Conversionaid: The Saas Podcast, Startups, Growth Hacking & Traction

Sarah Ahmad offered her first product for free during COVID. Nobody signed up. Her next company hit 10,000 customers and 8-figure ARR. The difference was SaaS product-market fit - validated before writing a single line of code. Sarah shares how she and her co-founder tested demand with a landing page in the YC community, signed 100 paying customers using Google Drive and a Stripe link, and built Stable into the leading AI-powered virtual mailbox for businesses. She also explains why the SEO playbook that built the company stopped working and what replaced it. Stable serves over 10,000 companies - from solopreneurs to enterprises like DoorDash, GitLab, and Realty Income - with 50-60 employees and operations across 20+ US locations. This episode is brought to you by:

100 restaurants. Every order processed manually. Zero lines of code. Zhong Xu built Deliverect by turning integration partners into a SaaS distribution channel that scaled his product 10x faster than direct sales. Here's how he reached 80,000 restaurants and nearly $100M ARR through partnerships instead of cold outreach. Zhong shares why he launched with a Wizard of Oz MVP, how he convinced competing software companies to distribute his product, and why he opened 10 offices in a single quarter during COVID to block local incumbents before they could form. Plus: Zhong's take on why AI might turn his platform into commodity infrastructure - and his strategy to stay ahead. Deliverect connects delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash to restaurant systems across 50 countries. Zhong previously co-founded a restaurant software company that merged with Lightspeed, which IPO'd in 2019. This episode is brought to you by:

Joel Griffith's first customer paid $200 a month. His infrastructure cost $50. He was profitable from day one. But it took three years of nights and weekends before his bootstrapped SaaS hit $500K ARR. Then Google Cloud launched a competing product and a startup raised $60M to go after his market. His growth did not flinch - because eight years of content had built a bootstrapped SaaS moat that funding could not replicate. You will learn how to get first customers for a bootstrapped SaaS by teaching on GitHub and Stack Overflow, why a self-funded SaaS content engine that compounds over 8 years outlasts any viral spike, and how to scale a bootstrap operation beyond what you can handle solo by partnering instead of hiring. Joel Griffith is the founder of Browserless, a browser automation platform approaching $4M ARR with under 10 people. Joel is a jazz trumpet player turned engineer who went through five failed B2C ideas before building a profitable SaaS by solving his own pain as a developer. He has never

Hundreds of competitors. Billions in funding. All giving product away for free. Vineet Jain ignored the playbook. No freemium. Enterprise sales only. A hybrid cloud approach nobody believed in. In this episode, founders will learn how Egnyte grew from $0 to $300M+ while raising just $137.5M - and why charging from day one beat free. Egnyte now has 23,000 customers, 1,400 employees, and has raised no additional funding since 2018. It took 12 years to hit $100M - then just 3 more to reach $200M and 1.5 to hit $300M. This episode is brought to you by:

Seven years selling a nice-to-have. Then 1,000 customers in year one. Adam Markowitz spent nearly a decade grinding in edtech before finding product-market fit at Drata. In this episode, founders will learn how to tell the difference between a vitamin and a painkiller - and why that distinction changes everything. Adam shares how experiencing a compliance pain at his first startup became the foundation for Drata, why he refused to sell until his team used their own product to get SOC 2 compliant, and how a "give before you take" approach to AWS made Drata a top 5 ISV on Marketplace in under two years. Drata has over 8,000 customers across 60 countries, more than 600 employees, and crossed $100 million in ARR before its fourth birthday. The company has raised over $300 million. This episode is brought to you by:

$2M to $9M ARR in one year. Then it nearly fell apart. Gilles Bertaux expanded Livestorm into meetings and sales demos after COVID, turning it into a smaller Zoom with no clear differentiator. In this episode, founders will learn how he rebuilt product-market fit by narrowing to a niche most would run from. Gilles shares why 85% of customers on monthly plans was a ticking time bomb, how a failed Series C forced the right strategic shift, and why targeting marketers instead of IT buyers let Livestorm avoid competing with Zoom on budget. Livestorm generates nearly $20 million in ARR with 3,500 customers and has raised $35 million. Gilles co-founded the company in 2016 as a university project and has led it through explosive COVID growth, a near-collapse in positioning, and a rebuild to product-market fit with enterprise buyers. This episode is brought to you by:

Adam Fard bootstrapped UX Pilot from a UX agency side project to $5 million ARR in under two years—growing from $3M to $5.3M in just five months—without VC funding, with 15,000 paying subscribers and a 30-person team. In this episode, early-stage bootstrapped SaaS founders will learn how Adam discovered a wireframing opportunity by testing competitors and realizing they were all faking AI generation with templates. You'll hear why he spent 6-7 months solving the genuinely hard technical problem of AI wireframe generation, and how focusing exclusively on design (not no-code, not backend) became UX Pilot's biggest competitive advantage. Adam also shares his biggest bootstrapped SaaS mistake: hiring too slowly. At $30K MRR, he questioned whether revenue might disappear and hired 1-2 people at a time, waiting months between hires. Looking back, he should have hired 5 people at once to gain velocity faster instead of prolonging the bootstrapped SaaS hiring process for months. This episode is brought to you by:

Two years. Almost no revenue. Tito Goldstein and his co-founder Arjun raised $3 million to build a scheduling tool for hourly workers. But when they took it to market, customers kept telling them the same thing: we need to stand out, not use cookie-cutter software. So they made a call that most founders would never risk - throw it all out and start over. The rebuild took a year. But when they launched the new version built on composable Legos instead of fixed features, it outsold the previous two years in the first month. Then it 3x'd, and 3x'd again. That's when Tito knew they'd finally found product-market fit. TeamBridge is now doing multiple seven figures with over 200 enterprise customers, including the San Francisco 49ers' Levi's Stadium and medical staffing agencies scaling to multimillion-dollar businesses with almost no admin staff. This episode is brought to you by:

He lived in his first customer's basement for a year. Nate Baker found Qualia's first customer by wearing a Stanford sweatshirt to a conference. That customer, Barry Feingold, didn't just sign up—he taught them the industry, made intros to competitors, and let the team live in his basement. In this episode, founders will learn how to find their first customers through network-based selling and multi-year upfront contracts. Nate shares the brutal early days: building for months without talking to customers, getting their first customer's software shut off overnight, and plateauing at $45K ARR because they didn't respect sales as a skill. Their VP of Sales told them: "I've never seen such a gap between great product and incompetent sales execution." Within 12 months, they went from $45K to $3.5M ARR. Today, Qualia generates over $100 million in ARR with 600 employees and has raised more than $200 million to transform the home buying process. This episode is brought to you by:

Nine months. Zero revenue. One cold text to a CMO. Yosef Peterseil landed McDonald's as Blings' first enterprise sales customer while bootstrapping—and learned why charging for POCs changes everything. In this episode, founders will learn how to close enterprise sales deals without a playbook, why free POCs kill your priority, and when you're actually ready to hire salespeople. Yosef shares how he validated the wrong ICP for months before discovering customer success managers had no budget, why a 13-month contract structure eliminates double negotiations, and the $30,000 event mistake that taught him to build follow-up systems first. Blings now serves McDonald's, Mercedes, Meta, and Rocket Mortgage—hitting $1M ARR in 2023 with just 19 people. This episode is brought to you by:

Bassem Hamdy almost killed his company with an investor-forced pivot before finding the strategy that saved it. In this episode, early-stage B2B SaaS founders will learn the founder-led sales playbook Briq uses to close enterprise deals in just 9 days. Bassem breaks down the dangers of selling to "Innovation Teams" and why those deals often waste time and money. You will learn how to avoid building "Frankenstein products" from disparate feature requests, why revenue per employee is the efficiency metric that actually matters, and how to bypass long enterprise procurement cycles by delivering immediate, small-scale value. In this episode, Bassem also shares the reality of "building the plane in the air," why he pivoted from a construction data cloud idea to forecasting, and the specific sales tactics founders need to earn trust with CFOs without relying on traditional product demos.

Saket Saurabh defied standard SaaS advice by skipping SMBs and selling directly to Enterprise giants like Instacart and LinkedIn from day one. Here is the "Enterprise First" strategy that allowed Nexla to become cash flow positive with multiple 7-figures in revenue before their Series A. In this episode, Saket (Co-founder & CEO of Nexla) breaks down exactly how to navigate complex corporate buy-cycles without a track record. Learn how he used "consultative selling" to close 6-figure contracts, the "Magic Moment" live-coding tactic that won Instacart, and the painful "Zero Salary" pivot the founders took to save the company and hit profitability.

Ibby Syed spent 18 months building a customer analytics product that hit $150K ARR—only to realize he'd accidentally built a consulting business, not a software company. Then his co-founder wrote 100 lines of code using the OpenAI API, and everything changed. In this episode, Ibby shares how he and his co-founder pivoted from a struggling analytics tool to building Kotera, an AI agent platform that crossed 7-figures in ARR. He explains why most vertical AI startups will grow fast and die, and how teaching customers to build their own agents created a more scalable business. You'll learn: How to use LinkedIn outbound with an 8-10% response rate to book 25+ customer interviews per week Why early revenue can trap you in a "local maxima" and make pivoting harder How 100 lines of API code outperformed a bloated data science solution and triggered a pivot Why sending prospects actual value (like leads) beats generic pitches in today's saturated market Why building horizontal tools may be more defe

Bilal Aijazi built one of the first Slack apps ever created. The install process was so clunky it required five manual steps of copying and pasting tokens. Yet 80% of people completed it anyway. That's when he knew Polly was solving something people desperately wanted. Today, Polly serves millions of monthly active users across Slack, Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Slides, and PowerPoint, generating multiple seven figures in ARR with just 20 people. But the journey from that first $8/month fantasy football customer to enterprise deals wasn't obvious—and platform risk nearly derailed everything when Slack launched competing features. You'll learn: How Bilal discovered that only 12% of Polly users would ever become creators and why that was actually a good thing for the business Why their first paying customer at $8/month for fantasy football led them to HR teams who now pay five-figure deals How adding simple demo booking hooks throughout Polly enabled hundreds of customer conversations that reve

James Ashford built GoProposal, a pricing and proposal platform for accountants, on a $5,000 WordPress multisite. Five years later, he sold it to Sage for eight figures with just 12 people on the team. But the path to that exit wasn't about raising money or building fancy tech. It was about moving faster than well-funded competitors, staying closer to customers than anyone else, and building systems that made the business sellable from day one. James picked off the top customers of a competitor with $75 million in funding by publishing helpful content daily, running weekly webinars, and speaking to an accountant every single day just to learn. You'll learn: How James built and launched his MVP for $5,000 on WordPress and why that helped him get to market quickly without funding Why going deep on one ICP for years gave him clarity, focus and traction in a crowded market How publishing useful content quickly, instead of polished content slowly, became his biggest differentiator and drove conversion

Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI platform for customer support that helps companies manage both human and AI agents more efficiently. Today, Assembled is an 8-figure ARR company with about 120 people, serves several hundred customers, and has raised $71 million. But getting there was brutal. Ryan and his co-founders spent two years building before launching in March 2020—the same day the WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. About 25% of demos didn't show up. It took them 8 months to earn their first dollar of revenue. When they finally got customers on usage-based pricing with no minimums, usage flatlined during the pandemic. They thought it was their fault before realizing it was macro-related. So they stopped chasing growth and focused on the customers getting value, meeting them in person and building what actually mattered. You'll learn: How Ryan knew he had a real business when he discovered that Stripe, Casper, and Grammarly had all built similar color-coded spreadsheets

Sam Darawish sold his first startup for $50M, then invested a few hundred thousand of his own money into Everflow. He didn't pay himself for two years. Most founders would never show screenshots at a trade show instead of a working product, but that's exactly what Sam did — and it landed his first customers. Today, Everflow generates nearly $30M ARR with 1,200 customers and a 120-person team across four continents. They've done it all without raising a single dollar of outside funding, proving that capital efficiency beats hypergrowth for building sustainable SaaS companies. You'll learn: Why showing screenshots at a trade show led to their first paying customers How narrowing to a tiny $70M TAM helped them reach $1M ARR faster What happened when they expanded to a bigger market that looked similar but wasn't Why spending only $400K to start forced them to focus on what really mattered How to maintain 25-30% growth while staying profitable from day one Full show notes → saasclub.io/459

David Shim sold his first startup for $200M, but when he started Read AI in 2021, he built something that failed spectacularly — 5% retention after 30 days. Instead of pivoting to chase revenue, he focused obsessively on fixing one metric: day-one ROI. Today, Read AI generates 8-figures in ARR, adds a million accounts monthly, and spends virtually nothing on marketing. David discovered that in the age of AI, the companies that win aren't the ones with the biggest models — they're the ones that solve real problems instantly. You'll learn: How David validated his idea by calling Zoom's founder directly and getting instant clarity Why focusing on day-one ROI instead of revenue led to 81% retention How to build viral loops that drive 1M+ monthly signups without marketing spend Why giving away your product for free can be your best growth strategy How to compete when Microsoft, Google, and Zoom enter your market Full show notes → saasclub.io/458 This episode is brought to you by:

Kevin Wagstaff and his brother Michael turned a $5,000 investment into a $27 million ARR home inspection software business—without raising venture capital for the first six years. After nine months of customer research, they built Spectora by focusing on one philosophy: serve before selling. Kevin answered every support message within 60 seconds for five years, showed up daily in online communities without pitching, and even took a 6AM Sunday demo that unlocked their biggest growth wave. Today, Spectora serves 12,000+ inspectors while Kevin has stepped back from the CEO role, recognizing he was best suited for the zero-to-10 journey. You'll learn: How 9 months of field research revealed the workflow problem worth solving Why starting SEO content 12 months before launch created an unfair advantage The 6AM Sunday demo that opened doors to an exclusive mastermind group How building 200+ websites became an unexpected 10% revenue stream When to recognize you're a "zero-to-10 founder" and step asi

Back in 2011, Sergiy Korolov's team accidentally sent 20,000 test billing emails to real customers—a complete disaster. They built a simple internal tool to prevent it from happening again, shared it with the Ruby on Rails community, and it exploded. Fast forward to today: Mailtrap generates seven-figure ARR with 100,000+ monthly active users. The journey wasn't easy. For five years, Mailtrap was just a free side project. When Sergiy finally monetized in 2016, growth was slow and methodical—it took four more years to hit $1M ARR. Then came the biggest challenge: pivoting from a tool that blocks emails to one that sends them in production. It meant rebuilding infrastructure, fighting brand confusion, and competing with giants like SendGrid and Mailgun. You'll learn: How making signup surveys required provided deep customer insights without hurting conversions How a fake "Email Campaigns" button validated product demand before building anything Why community trust and developer-first thinking beat f