If everything in your business fell apart, and you had to rebuild from scratch… what would you do differently? This is usually a hypothetical question. But not necessarily nowadays… and definitely not for Ben Jabbawy a few years back. Ben is the founder and CEO of Privy, marketing automation software for e-commerce stores. In 2013, they raised a seed round $2 MIL from investors. 2 years later, in 2015… all they had left was $1000 in the bank. They had

When I built my company Clarity.fm, I remember staying up until 3AM designing how this software would work. But I’m not a designer. So I used an awesome wireframing tool called Balsamiq. It was a dream to use. In no time at all, I had a working prototype for my SaaS, the same one that was later successfully acquired by Fundable. I love Balsamiq. And I recommend it to all “graphically challenged” software founders.

Investors WANT to spend their money. Yes, they actually want to write big, big cheques. For years, I believed that the stories of successful SaaS businesses that attracted massive investments were just myths. Unicorns. Until 3 things happened:

Are you competing on business models? You could be. Check out this quote: “Technology or not, every organization has a business model. Some are conscious of it. Some are not. Some try to change it. Some don't.” “Some just compete on products... whereas they could compete on superior business models.”

If you have a B2B business that negotiates deals directly with your customers, then I’ll bet you’ve got headaches to do with money. Sales call followed by proposals…  Rejected and then renegotiated… All hoping that in the end, you can close a big deal that really moves the needle.  Only to realize that getting the customer is just half of the battle! 

Back when SaaS was still a new word (circa 2006), Jon Miller started Marketo, a software product that gave businesses an end-to-end view of their customer’s journey. The technology was revolutionary. No longer was a marketing team just collecting leads to give to the sales team...  ...but businesses were able to track and optimize every touchpoint. From ads, to website visitor, to sale, to upsell, to retention and residual profits. Marketo’s goal was to offer enterprise power at an affordable

Want to learn what it’s like to compete against Amazon and win? I first met Tobi the Co-founder & CEO of Shopify.com 10 years ago in San Francisco while they were fundraising for their series A... ... most investors said “No”. (We dig into this during my interview... specifically, what those investors missed!) Fast forward to today and they have more than 1M businesses paying them every month, from over 175 countries with total gross merchandise volume exceeding $50 BILLION.

“How do you maximize your revenue?”  It’s the question that everyone wishes there was an easy answer too. No, I don’t mean that as a thought-provoking chin-stroking question to ponder from the armchair.  I mean how do you actually do it? How do big businesses know the right steps - backed with data - that are going to blast them to their revenue goals and beyond? Answer:

I can’t believe this... One of the guys on my marketing team told me he Googled my name and you know what came up as a suggested search term? “Dan Martell Wife”. Google only suggests popular searches, so… Does that mean people are Googling who my wife is?! Oh man that makes me laugh. I’ve got a better idea -- How about you meet her?

Where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?  Is it in your blood? For whatever reason that I still haven’t figured out, I’m in a family of business owners.  So for this week’s episode of Escape Velocity, I wanted to try something a little different. I sat down and interviewed Pierre Martell, the CEO of Martell Custom Homes. Yes… I interviewed my brother.