Saas Open Mic By Chartmogul

Tope Awotona, Founder and CEO of Calendly is big on Focus, and it’s clear that this has played a big part in launching his product to the world. Tope moved from a background of Enterprise Sales in businesses like IBM, Perceptive Software and EMC to solve a problem that was close to his heart in those roles: Scheduling. I Spoke to Tope about why the freemium SaaS model has been key to the product’s success so far, how the most important acquisition channel for Calendly is the product itself, and how he manages feedback from customers, among other things.

Typeform is one of europe’s hottest SaaS businesses, after raising a $15M Series A in 2015. And moving into a beautiful, expansive new office space this year. I wanted to get some insights from David into his thinking around user experience (UX) as a concept, and how the team at Typeform are pushing beyond this into what is referred to as Human Experience. HX spans much wider than UX, and goes at least some of the way towards capturing the complete experience a person encounters when interacting with a brand or company. The Typeform team have published some excellent content around this, showing that they're really pushing the boundaries of current product thinking.

Go to the website of London-based Connect Ventures and the first thing you’ll see is three statements: They invest early. They are product focused. They are hands on. But what drives this approach to investing in young startups? I spoke to Managing Partner Pietro Bezza to find out.

Alex Theuma is the man behind the online community SaaScribe, as well as a new B2B SaaS-focused conference called SaaStock, which will take place for the first time this September. So why did Alex move from the world of B2B sales to growing a community — starting from nothing?

Jameson, now a subscription box pioneer, set out to build his first subscription box business (Conscious Box) purely out of interest and product potential. Yet some years later, he's crafted a formula for subscription box success, and reaps the benefits of a recurring-revenue-based lifestyle business.

Alex is a driving force of the Paris startup scene, having founded several startups himself and worked at the capital's startup builder eFounders before moving onto new projects. I wanted to really understand why he decided to create B2B rocks, as well as his vision for the future of the conference.

Emeric of Agorapulse dives deep on measuring social media performance and interaction for businesses and his experience with the problems in the space. If you want to understand the performance of your social media efforts, start here!

Word of mouth is one of the oldest forms of marketing there is. It’s also the most effective. But in today’s world, when customers are other companies, what is it really worth? And how are B2B businesses making the most of it? Read this full article and many more at http://blog.chartmogul.com. Narrated by Annie Musgrove Produced by Ed Shelley & Annie Musgrove Music by Podington Bear

I sat down with Szymon Klimczak, CMO of LiveChat - A SaaS-based live chat and helpdesk product for businesses. LiveChat was founded in 2002 and has a somewhat remarkable story of pivots, organic growth and selling SaaS before SaaS was really a "thing".

Since launching in 2015, Clearbit has gone from strength-to-strength in their quest to be the definitive Business Intelligence infrastructure for businesses. In this chat, co-founder and CEO Alex MacCaw talks about his career in tech and engineering, including working for Stripe in the "early" days and travelling the world whilst writing his book on Javascript.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I visited the headquarters of Blinkist - a consumer-focused SaaS business in Berlin, who have recently raised Series A investment and are pioneering in the learning app space.

This week I sat down for a chat with Murat, who left a career in design to grow his app prototyping platform, Marvel. Marvel began as a side project, but gained enough traction since launch to rapidly grow into a full-scale business.

This week I spoke to Bjoern - Founder of Ivyleads, a simple solution for managing and nurturing sales leads. We chatted about his early YCombinator experience, constant involvement in side projects and focus on design.

SaaS Open Mic 02: Vinay Seshadri - Director Product, ChartMogul by ChartMogul

I grabbed a 20-minute chat with Nikos (@moraitakis), to discuss a range of SaaS-related topics: - How Workable was started (in Greece) and eventually moved to Boston - SaaS Metrics and measurement in a high-growth environment - Customer Churn characteristics – Dealing with a high amount of “sleeper” accounts that eventually reactivate - Pausing vs. cancelling subscriptions, and the perceived difference for customers - The economics of a SaaS business past initial traction stage, and the difficulty of capturing/balancing other business costs - LTV, Payback Period and how to make them useful