Afgespeeld
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Episode 121 of 14 minutes of SaaS – Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann – 2 of 3 – chats with AppSelekt CEO Stephen Cummins in Lisbon: "It’s ok to get negative reviews. Actually negative reviews can be more valuable for you than positive reviews ... We did an AB split test where we're showing consumers a page with one negative review. And the other page has zero reviews. And then we do a split test that says “so which one are people more likely to buy from? And people are far, far more likely to buy from the one with one negative review ... The notion that, 'oh, you have to be perfect!' is actually not believed by your customers"
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Part 1 of a 6-part series for 14 Minutes of SaaS. Georg Petschnigg in conversation with Stephen Cummins. "It's funny because my childhood rebellion then actually ended up… you know, leaving that sort of entrepreneurial spirit of the household home and then joining a major American corporation. So I ended up joining Microsoft out of college then and starting my career there. And that was more like, yeah, that's …. my rebellion was working for the man!"
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Patrick Campbell, SaaS pricing guru and CEO & Founder of Profitwell, in conversation with Stephen Cummins for 14 Minutes of SaaS. When he got tired of working for the intelligence services in the US and learning stuff about the world he’d maybe rather not have found out – he left and eventually set up Profitwell - a SaaS business for other SaaS businesses who value understanding how to improve the financial metrics underpinning their subscription business. #14MoS
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Polina Montano, Job Today Co-Founder – 3 of 3 – a Tech Star is Born
A Tech Star is Born - Polina goes deeper into Job Today and discusses the changes that have occurred in the company and the reason why it can be a motor for economic growth by empowering companies to hire faster and better and to subsequently succeed better - as well as provide better opportunities for candidates.
TRANSCRIPT
We are the ones that are imposing these limits on ourselves. We have to believe in ourselves a bit more … like … just cut yourself some slack and give yourself some credit and say ‘why not?’ ‘why would I not be able to do that if I really… really want to? If I'm really really motivated. It's our own fears of not being good enough … of not being qualified … of not being able to do that. This is something which prevent us from doing things.
Stephen Cummins
Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS, the show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world's most remarkable SaaS ScaleUps.
This the final episode of our three part mini-series with Polina Montano - recorded in the Websummit in Lisbon. She goes into more depth on Job Today and the service they provide. She talks about it from the point of view of both the employer and the employee - and she's also touches upon the future of work issues around inclusivity and gender equality.
Polina Montano
Work is a vital need for most of us. And so, the impact on the economy is tremendous if we make hiring easier – something that might take the hassle out of hiring. We would like the beauty of the platform to be also how it enables new job creation - because as a small business owner if you know, it's going to be very difficult for you to bring someone onboard - chances are you're just gonna put more pressure on your existing team. And by giving you a solution which is easy and intuitive and fast and inefficient to use … chances are they actually help you maybe hire more people and give opportunities to more candidates out there.
Stephen Cummins
Okay, now a couple of things I love about the philosophy behind the company is that, it allows for example, graduates, who don't have any references really in the workspace you know, to present themselves in a video format - so the employer gets an immediate impression about the individual. From the employer's point of view if they're not just putting bums on seats .. they actually can see the individual and think that my work actually ,…. that person could work in team … but I love the local! The fact that you focused on the local because that's the great irony .. people are down the road from you… you can't… you can't connect with them. Is there any vision to go a little step further where by you make the connection, you're the employee or the employer and whereby you somehow facilitate even the meeting place … is there any plan to build that out … where everything just gets seamless? Where Job Today even facilitates the meeting and everything. Is that too much?
Polina Montano
No it's definitely not too much! The whole idea is to make hiring simple. That's the core mission - just take the friction out of hiring. And absolutely - the scheduling of interviews and making sure it is a better fit and the best match between employer and candidate. It's definitely the direction in which I'm working – it makes perfect sense. As you know, the biggest hiring pain in service industry is no shows - we track which people apply for jobs with which vendor. They don't bother come for the interview. So clearly better communication and better processes can improve that.
Stephen Cummins
And if you were a candidate and you sign up for job today and you do two or three no shows, will that affect your ranking … because I know you're ranking the employers. Are you ranking the job seekers?
Polina Montano
Yes, absolutely. In the future yes – we are working on our ranking system right now – its all about bringi... -
E75 - Part 4 and concluding episode of a mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. In this final episode we find out about Jonathan’s beliefs regarding a lot of faster developing tech areas – and, more importantly, why they should be adopted and introduced into the business with caution. And - he has some amazing advice for anyone seeking to start a business.
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Episode 72 – Part 1 of a 4-part mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall in conversation with Stephen Cummins. Founded in Paris in 2014, it’s the only cloud phone system that has built integrations into 100 different SaaS applications in 2019. Its mission is to unlock the power of voice, specifically the power of telephone calls through integration the Intercoms, Salesforces, Zendesks, gong.io’s and freshdesks of today. It's valuation is already north of 250M USD
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Phil Chambers, CEO & Co-founder of employee engagement software leader Peakon chats with Stephen Cummins. Founded in 2014, it’s raised $68M in investment. Employee numbers have gone from 80 to 230 in 24 months. Phil tells us his story leading up to this startup and how Peakon can detect whether your best staff are thinking of leaving up to 250 days in advance
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Martin Henk grew up in a small place in Estonia and ultimately became Co-founder and former CPO (Chief Product Officer) of a certain well known rocket-ship known as PipeDrive. He talks about the importance of product validation as early as possible, and about how entrepreneurs and product builder need to stay focused and clear and avoid distractions. In conversation with Stephen Cummins.
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Adi Azaria, Workiz CEO & Sisense Co-founder; Growth Hacking in Red Oceans.Stephen Cummins met Adi for a second time in the Web Summit and it was all change. He had navigated the difficult path of separation from a business intelligence rocketship SiSense, which he’d co-founded, to falling in love with the startup world again, and finding his latest passion in field service scheduling software Workiz. If you’re interested in hearing more about Adi’s formative years, tune into episode 8 of 14 Minutes of SaaS … although recorded early in the life of the podcast, it is one of the episodes that has had the highest listenership.
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E63: Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Segment. Since this interview Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Segment, and his team have raised another 175M USD to bring total funding to to $284 million and a valuation of over 1.5B.
He validated an idea he was trying to kill by publishing a link to a sign up page on Hacker News – pretending they’d built it. The response was massive and Segment built it’s 1st hugely successful product in just 5 days
Peter talks about why building a business where the target customer is developers can to some degree sidestep the question of what company size range you chase after initially. He describes Segment as a customer data infrastructure company – he wants to help customers manage all of their data from different sources. He lets us know whether or not he’s interested in building a marketing automation app on top of that and gives his view on the rise of 100% remote teams. This episode is about how Peter helped lay the foundation for building of a unicorn, by trying to kill the idea before it was brought into existence. If you love classic early validation stories, tune into the next instalment of 14 Minutes of SaaS. He also talks about how selling to developers can bypass the old chestnut of whether you want to go after SMBs or the Enterprise first.
TRANSCRIPT
Peter Reinhardt
The most important thing about a business in the early stages is finding product market fit. After product market fit it becomes go-to-market and distribution, but prior to product market fit nothing else matters. And I think it really requires actually a scepticism. And I think the failure mode for most companies prior to product market fit is that they drink their own kool-ade. They have a vision for the world - of how the world should be. And they build a product to try to make the world like that. But actually the world doesn’t give a shit.=
Stephen Cummins
Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS, the show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world's most remarkable SaaS ScaleUps.
Since this interview Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Segment, and his team have raised another 175M USD to bring total funding to to $284 million and a valuation of over 1.5B. Peter talks about why building a business where the target customer is developers can to some degree sidestep the question of what company size range you chase after initially. He describes Segment as a customer data infrastructure company – he wants to help customers manage all of their data from different sources. He lets us know whether or not he’s interested in building a marketing automation app on top of that and gives his view on the rise of 100% remote teams.
Ok – we’ve got Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Segment here at the WebSummit. Nice to meet you.
Peter Reinhardt
Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you as well.
Stephen Cummins
Tell me a little bit about your life up to Segment
Peter Reinhardt
Sure. I grew up in Seattle and was really into math. Then went to MIT and decided math was a little too abstract. Then studied physics. Decided physics was a little too abstract. Then studied aerospace engineering. I wasn’t going to get my aerospace engineering degree. But anyway I decided aerospace engineering was a little too abstract anyway. And ended up dropping out with my roommates and starting a company. So made the whole transition from math to business. For the last seven eight years have been working on a company that’s now doing reasonably well.
Stephen Cummins
What made you decide to found Segment?
Peter Reinhardt
So originally we … myself and my roommates in MIT … we were just interested in starting a company together. So we were roommates and best friends and just really wanted to spend more and more time together working on cool things. So we actually started as a classroom lecture tool. And the idea was to give students this button to push to say ‘I'm confused’ and the... -
In the WebSummit in Lisbon we interview, for the 2nd time, Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO & Co-founder of enterprise search platform Algolia. For Nicolas developers are the new heroes and they have a big influence on the buying decision for Algolia. The company is in the news having raised $110M after the interview we did. He was the 2nd person we’d ever interviewed. Check out episode 2 of 14 Minutes of SaaS if you’re interested in company culture.
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Harry really underlines the value of finding an amazing co-founder - his talented room-mate in college for 4 years, Tom O'Neil. He started his career in Google in product management and that was a very formative experience for him. Since this interview Harry’s company Periscope was acquired by SiSense and now he’s the General Manager and CMO there.
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Part 2 and concluding episode of Phil Chambers, CEO & Co-founder of employee engagement software leader Peakon chats with Stephen Cummins. We go much deeper into the value that Peakon actually introduces into the world – and how things like contextual learning targets can improve management teams more effectively and how comparatively high Peakon numbers can be used to attract employees to your company
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Nicolas Dessaigne is the Founder & CEO @ Algolia, the most reliable platform for building search into your business. Just last week they raised $53m in funding led by Accel with participation from Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr, Point Nine Capital, AppDynamic’s Jyoti Bansal, Intercom’s Des Traynor and InVision’s Clark Valberg and more incredible investors.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
How Nicolas made his way to YC and came to found Algolia? What are the key things that change when you cross the 10m in ARR milestone? What have been the fundamental learnings in the march to $10m in ARR? Jason Lemkin has said before that ‘the first 10 unaffiliated customers you get is the first sign of pre-success’. Does Nicolas agree with him here? When are the first signs of pre-success for Nicolas? Does Nicolas agree with Jason that $1m-$2m in ARR is always the hardest for a scaling SaaS startup? Which element did Nicolas find most challenging? How has Nicolas seen himself change and develop as a leader with these inflection points? What are the fundamental to building a successful developer community? What have Algolia done to do this so successfully? What mistakes do other startups normally make in their pursuit of this?60 Second SaaStr
What hires does Nicolas wish he had made earlier? What does success look like for Nicolas with Algolia? What does Nicolas know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Nicolas Dessaigne
