When I started Flowtown, we were treading water in the reddest of oceans. Social sharing and publishing tools were all the rage, and standing out from the crowd was NOT going to be easy. Fortunately, we were able to lean into one key differentiator in our feature set for our product called Timely. It was almost criminally simple -- but by being the only social publishing tool that CHOSE the ideal time to post for you (based on our algorithm)...

Not all leads are created equal. Even if you’ve dialed in your ideal customer profile and built out your distribution channels to only attract the perfect prospect… ...you’re still gonna have to implement systems and filters to separate your buyers from your tire kickers. This is especially true in the scaling phase where spending too much time with non-buyers will tax your sales team, inspire bad decisions with “false negatives”, and create a whole slew of crushing inefficiencies. After taking

Prospect: “Great product. It’s just not a now thing” You: “Okay cool. Totally get it. Thanks for your time.” Boom. That right there is a masterclass on how to blow a SaaS deal, deprive a would-be customer of the value they could’ve received, and being forced to go back to your team with your tail between your legs.

Ever read about those outrageous “rider” demands that touring musicians demand from the concert promoter? … Iggy Pop demands a Bob Hope impersonator. … Mariah Carey insists on gallons of vitamin water to bathe her dogs in. … Van Halen would refuse to take the stage if a brown M&M found its way into the candy jar. Borderline insane right?

I have a little secret. A few years ago when I started coaching growth-minded SaaS founders on how to scale their companies, I created someone named ‘Software Scaling Sam”. Sam was obsessed with growth, had achieved product/market fit, and was ready to take full ownership and responsibility in scaling beyond 10k MRR. If you think that Sam sounds quite a bit like you, that’s because Sam is you.

Want to know the quickest way to kill your company and team morale? It’s super easy. Invest tens of thousands of dollars and man hours in building your software, only to find out after the fact that your market couldn’t care less. Done. Now you can happily go back to whatever world you just left behind. On the flipside, if you want to launch your startup the smart way by pre-selling your product BEFORE you build it…

I first met Matt Goldman - serial entrepreneur & CEO of Churn Buster - 3 years ago in San Diego just after selling Clarity.fm. I was invited to speak at the local co-working space and Matt saw that I was in town, so he asked me to come on his Rocketship.fm podcast. It was a super fun conversation and I realized this guy was talented. Fast forward a few years and Matt sold his previous company, bought Churn Buster and

Six years ago, Renée and I were living in San Francisco. I had just closed a round of funding for Clarity.fm while Renée had just co-founded a new marketing agency of her own. Things were crazy. But they were about to get crazier ;-) Turns out Renée was pregnant with our first son, Max… and it took a whole 3-months after Max was born for Noah to sneak into the picture. Add it all up and our two boys are

I’ve nerded out to over 1,000 business books. Of course, there’s the *obvious* classics like Traction, Scaling Up, and Good to Great. But there’s also this little-known, underground classic that I REFUSE to let any of my private coaching clients do without. It’s so *under the radar* that at last count, it had a whopping total of 9 Amazon reviews (all of them 5 stars by the way...)

Tell them what to do.   Check that’s been done. Tell them what to do next. Leadership 101 right there. A fine recipe if you want to run a mediocre company with eight or  ten B level players that constantly tap into your managerial bandwidth and cripple your capacity to achieve accelerated growth. An outdated paradigm for any SaaS founder with more ambitious plans to scale. For that SaaS founder, I offer a major upgrade from the “transactional leadership” approach.