The SaaS Podcast: Build, Launch & Scale Your SaaS

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. 🔑 Key Lessons 🏢 The "Enterprise First" Bet: Why targeting SMBs would have failed and why he went straight for the Fortune 500. 🪄 The Magical Moment: How his co-founder live-coded a fix during a pitch meeting to close Instacart. 📉 The Hard Reset: Cutting founder salaries to $0 and downsizing to achieve cash flow positivity. 🤝 Founder-Led Sales: How to sell "Build vs. Buy" to technical buyers who think they can do it themselves. 🧠 Nvidia Lessons: The "Critical Path" advice from Jensen Huang that guides his leadership today. 📖 Chapters Introduction & The "Profit" Quote What is Nexla? (Solving the Data Fragmentation Problem) The Origin: From Ad Tech to Data Infrastructure The Contrarian Strategy: Why "Enterprise First"? Landing the First Customer (Instacart) The "Live Code" Sales Demo Strategy Figuring out Enterprise Pricing & POs Founder-Led Sales: Closing the First 15 Customers Overcoming the "We Can Build It Ourselves" Objection The Pivot: Going "Zero Salary" to Hit Cash Flow Positive The Impact of AI on Data Engineering Lightning Round: Best Advice & Productivity Tools This episode is brought to you by: 💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free 📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo 🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20 Resources: 🎧 Full Show Notes: saasclub.io/464 🎤 Subscribe to the Podcast: saasclub.io/subscribe 💌 Get weekly 5-minute SaaS insights: saasclub.io/email 💡 Join the SaaS Club founder community: saasclub.co/plus

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 revealed their real monetization path What happened when Slack launched Workflow Builder six months after Polly signed their first five-figure deals and how they survived Why Bilal believes every founder building on platforms must eventually become a platform themselves or risk getting crushed Full show notes → saasclub.io/462 This episode is brought to you by: 💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free 🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20 📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo Get weekly SaaS lessons and new founder stories → saasclub.io/email

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 and onboarding How simple playbooks helped the team deliver a consistent customer experience and scale without complexity How James created demand and trust long before the sale, so customers came in already bought into his approach Full show notes → saasclub.io/461 This episode is brought to you by: 💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free 📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo 🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20 Get weekly SaaS lessons and new founder stories → saasclub.io/email

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 What Ryan learned the hard way about usage-based pricing with no minimums and how they fixed it How Ryan's team decided which early deals requiring custom work would help them grow versus become distractions Why Assembled focused on one Slack community instead of trying to be everywhere at once The simple method Ryan used to create a detailed ICP by looking at patterns in the customers he already had Full show notes → saasclub.io/460 This episode is brought to you by: 🔐 ⁠⁠⁠Sprinto⁠⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and book a demo today⁠ 💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → ⁠Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free 📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo 🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20 Get weekly SaaS lessons and new founder stories → saasclub.io/email