The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

He asked buyers to rip out their whole Salesforce stack. The first 200 to 300 called him crazy. David Zhu, co-founder and CEO of Reevo, built an all-in-one AI sales platform and learned the hard way how to sell it. He kept the platform and changed the ask: buyers start with one piece, like the dialer, the sequencer or the AI-native CRM. David explains why Reevo spent two years in stealth before selling, how a founder he met at an AWS program became the first paying customer before seeing the product, and how Reevo got to $1M ARR in 6 months while an introvert ran founder-led sales. He also shares the Mom Test mistake he made early on. Plus: why the startups that happily adopted his whole platform turned out to be false validation. David ran engineering teams at DoorDash and worked with Keith Rabois at OpenStore before founding Reevo, his fifth startup, with a founding team of 14. Reevo now serves hundreds of customers without paid marketing. 🔑 Key Lessons Be strict on architecture, flexible on the sale: Reevo kept its all-in-one platform but stopped demanding rip-and-replace. Letting a buyer start with one tool asks for a much smaller first yes than throwing out Salesforce. Give buyers three doors, not the whole menu: Reevo groups its land motions into pipeline generation, deal progression and manager reporting. Prospects pick their biggest pain instead of facing every module and integration at once. Watch out for false validation: Startups with no RevOps leader or security review adopted Reevo's whole platform easily. That said little about the entrenched mid-market buyers Reevo actually wanted to win. Play to your strength, not someone else's game: David had no sales brand, so he built on what he did have, a dense engineering team. Copying founders who have distribution you lack is how you lose. Open the deal, then hand off the close: David, an introvert, sent the first email and ran the intro call. A founding sales leader from HubSpot closed, and Reevo copied his talk tracks across 12 to 15 AEs. Ask for payment to test your discovery: Early prospects praised David's pitch, then said no when he asked them to pay. The Mom Test's non-leading questions get you to the honest answer sooner. Don't outsource ICP discovery: Paying a vendor $50,000 to run your outbound skips the learning. David says founders without product-market fit have to do discovery themselves or risk a false start. Chapters What Reevo does and who it's for Founding team of 14 and the size of the business From DoorDash and OpenStore to the idea for Reevo Why Reevo built in stealth for two years The first paying customer from an AWS program The Mom Test mistake and winning without a sales brand Founder-led sales as an introvert Platform vs point solution 200 buyers called the rip-and-replace pitch crazy Selling the platform one piece at a time Why startup customers were false validation Three land motions instead of an a la carte menu Vibe coding, outsourced SDRs and enterprise bake-offs Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/499 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email

He walked into his first pricing call asking for $100,000 and walked out with $10,000 a year. Shahar Azulay had never sold anything before co-founding groundcover, and the product he was selling had no user interface yet, just a sensor and some dashboards. He took it anyway, and still argues that was the right call. Shahar explains why founders should close their first dozen customers at almost any price, how he published a per-host list price and then discounted it up to 70 percent, and how his first 50 to 100 customers came from his own network plus 10 to 15 LinkedIn messages a day. Plus: the moment customers started ripping Datadog out on their own, before groundcover had built anything to help them do it. Shahar Azulay is the co-founder and CEO of groundcover, an eBPF observability platform that lets engineering teams monitor production without changing their code. He has grown it to eight-figure ARR with more than 250 customers, competing head-on with Datadog and New Relic. 🔑 Key Lessons Close your first dozen deals at any price: Early contract value teaches you nothing. The reps, the reference logos, and learning to survive security and legal reviews are what make the next twenty deals closeable. Publish your price when you sell to mid-market: A public number per host anchors the conversation and skips a negotiation a first-time founder will lose. groundcover listed $30 per host, then discounted up to 70 percent. Don't expect to grow your earliest accounts: Shahar never planned to 10x those first contracts. Chasing them traps you in old relationships when the rest of the market is still unsold and will pay more. Your first sales calls are really feedback calls: Prospects treat a founder as someone to advise, not buy from. Shahar framed early meetings as "we'd love to show you what we're building" and converted from there. Selling the deal is not replacing the incumbent: groundcover closed customers who still kept Datadog running. The post-sale migration motion only got built after those early displacement attempts visibly failed. A remote first hire with no local team will fail: The first SDR in North America was hired alone, remote, under marketing, with no one around him. Shahar calls it a failure of gravity, not of the person. Bet on the technology your team can already build: eBPF worked for groundcover because the founders came from cybersecurity and knew how to ship a safe kernel agent. Incumbents selling SDKs still struggle to copy it. Chapters Introduction What groundcover does and who buys it Why observability pricing stopped making sense Bring your own cloud and charging per host From Apple and cybersecurity to founding groundcover Discovering eBPF and betting the company on it Why no other observability vendor was using eBPF The first customer, three months in Asking $100K and closing at $10K Why founders should close at any price Publishing list pricing and discounting 70% Being the entire sales function Prospecting on LinkedIn, 10 to 15 a day Getting out of the friend zone on sales calls Hiring the first AEs, SDRs and sales engineers When customers decided it could replace Datadog Failing to rip out the incumbent Learning when you have no leverage Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/497 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email

He never bought a keyword, never ran content marketing, and the big outbound sales force he tried did not work. Rodney Robinson still grew TabaPay to $100 million in revenue, almost entirely through inbound, on a single $2.5 million seed round that stayed the company's only outside money for nine years. Rodney explains how he found a problem Mastercard could not solve, why he chased small fintechs instead of big logos, how his inbound marketing came from banks and the card networks rather than ads, and why he believes outbound sales no longer works in B2B. Plus: the six-month lawsuit that cost TabaPay its sponsor bank, and what Rodney had personally put on the line to get that bank in the first place. TabaPay is payment processing infrastructure that gives fintechs one API to move money instantly in both directions, and processes payments for companies like Dave. The company runs at $100 million in revenue with about 150 people, profitable, growing 35 to 40 percent a year. On the day this interview was recorded, Rodney announced a $155 million raise and the acquisition of a bank. 🔑 Key Lessons Build what the incumbent is forbidden to build: Mastercard would not add pull payments because it would compete with its biggest processors. That structural refusal, not a missed feature, was the opening TabaPay walked through. Make the trusted party your sales channel: Fintechs do not know a new processor, but they trust their bank and Visa. TabaPay processes for about 20 banks and lets those relationships generate its inbound pipeline. Solve revenue before expense: Rodney paid vendors above market to reach the market in a year, charged what it would bear, then displaced the vendors later. Getting to revenue outranked protecting early margin. Chase minnows, not whales: The first ten customers were small fintechs where the founders already knew each other. Those minnows grew into whales, and the relationship carried through the growth. Reliability is the product for infrastructure: Three vendors at 99 percent availability leaves you down about 3 percent of the time. Customers bet their business on payments working, so TabaPay took the stack in house. Expect arrows in year one: Six months in, another company claimed TabaPay stole its software and the sponsor bank dropped them. They won, but only because there was nothing to find. Chapters What TabaPay does $100M in revenue with 150 people The $2.5M round that lasted nine years Raising $155M and buying a bank The problem Mastercard would not solve Finding the wedge by listening How the money actually moves A year to build the first version Solving revenue before expense Pledging his house for a sponsor bank Landing the first ten customers Chasing minnows instead of whales When vendors go down Owning the stack end to end Channels that wasted time Why outbound sales is dead in B2B Building the inbound engine Pricing against commoditization Fraud data as a value-add The lawsuit that cost them their bank Making every customer feel like the biggest Why buy a bank Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/495 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email