This week Shira interviews Shaul from Jifiti on how Jifiti went from a business to consumer product to a business to business platform. How the pivot happened and how business processed had to change to accommodate sales.
About Shaul Weisband
Shaul is the Co-Founder of Jifiti.com – an Israeli startup with offices in Tel Aviv and Columbus, Ohio. Jifiti has raised over $7m in funding from leading investors and its technologies are used by partners such as IKEA, Staples, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Evite.com and Dreamworks.
Prior to founding Jifiti Shaul spent five years in the Israeli Ministry of Homeland Security.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, teen and tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
The SaaS Insider podcast is brought to you by Hunter & Bard, a marketing agency specializing in design, branding, content and marketing automation – helping SaaS companies reduce their marketing debt. Check out Hunter & Bard today at http://hunterandbard.com
Please rate this podcast.
SaaS Insider is a podcast about how to grow, market and sell Software as a Service products. The show has featured a wide range of experts from Elizabeth Yin from 500 Startups, Neil Patel from Quick Sprout, to Tim Lynch from Applango.
Please rate this podcast.
SaaS Insider is a podcast about how to grow, market and sell Software as a Service products. The show has featured a wide range of experts from Elizabeth Yin from 500 Startups, Neil Patel from Quick Sprout, to Tim Lynch from Applango.
This week Shira interviews Ben Nunney, formerly of Twilio and now of Metalogix on going from a startup back to enterprise. How he focuses on the priorities for a new position and how growth worked back in the day at Twilio.
About Ben Nunney
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennunney
Ben Nunney is an avidly diverse marketer who believes that the line between sales and marketing teams is virtually non-existent. After working with SaaS for over ten years and going from corporate to unicorn and back again, his viewpoint is as unique as it is varied.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, teen and tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
The SaaS Insider podcast is brought to you by Hunter & Bard, a marketing agency specializing in design, branding, content and marketing automation – helping SaaS companies reduce their marketing debt. Check out Hunter & Bard today at http://hunterandbard.com
Saastock is a non-vendor conference in Europe about SaaS. Today I talked with Alex Theuma, the founder of SaaStock on what he looks for in a company to be on stage, how he started the SaaScribe SaaStock and his podcast - and how having 3 separate brands is a bit of a handful to handle.
About Alex
Sold Software for 10+ years, now jumping in to SaaS flavoured Startup life and learning new skills every day.
Currently he can be found writing and doing editorial at SaaScribe, Hosting The SaaS Revolution Show Podcast, organising local SaaS Meetups and making Europe's premier B2B SaaS Conference, SaaStock.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, teen and tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
The SaaS Insider podcast is brought to you by Hunter & Bard, a marketing agency specializing in design, branding, content and marketing automation – helping SaaS companies reduce their marketing debt. Check out Hunter & Bard today at http://hunterandbard.com
SaaS Insider is a podcast about growth, marketing and sales in Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.
This week is a double feature, with the CEO and CMO of Gamewheel. We talk about gamification, automation and monetization. Plus selling a tool that automates creativity and the complications that this entails.
Evgeni
Evgeni is an artist, entrepreneur and technology expert. He was born in Russia and studied computer science and economy in Germany. Afterwards he created the first global web-based certification platform at TUV Group and worked at BCG/Platinion as a strategic consultant and digital architect for 5+ years. In parallel, Evgeni released 3 albums with his band Timid Tiger via Warner/Chappell and Sony/Columbia.
In October 2012 he took a break from the band and focused on his startup idea, after winning the first hy! Berlin startup competition (acquired by the biggest German publisher Axel Springer). He founded the augmented reality studio Toywheel with the mission playfully connect physical and virtual worlds. His co-founder Christian Bittler has successfully produced and sold over 100 games in his career - from AAA console to mobile games. Their startup raised about 1.5 million dollars VC capital to-date and launched B2B SaaS platform Gamewheel beginning of 2015 to enable enterprises to effectively communicate on mobile with power of gamification and mobile AR/VR technology. 1000+ marketers, also big names like Paramount, Oracle and Burger King, discovered Gamewheel online and use it regularly to level up engagement and performance of mobile marketing campaigns. Now, Gamewheel is closing the next round of financing and expanding to the US and China.
Taner
Taner Akcok creates data-driven marketing and product strategies, with focus on understanding the customer and keeping with the market trends. He designs advanced SaaS funnels and metrics to monitor customer journey and improve the processes of business/product to maximize customer lifetime value.
He started to his career at Microsoft as a Program Manager. After 4 years Microsoft experience, he moved to Silicon Valley and worked at various companies as a C-Level executive. Then he started his own startup “appanalytics.io” and it became 2nd Fastest Growing B2B Startup under the world radar according to Business Insider. After he exited his company he joined to Gamewheel team in Berlin. Now he is working at Gamewheel as a Chief Marketing Officer.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, teen and tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
The SaaS Insider podcast is brought to you by Hunter & Bard, a marketing agency specializing in design, branding, content and marketing automation – helping SaaS companies reduce their marketing debt. Check out Hunter & Bard today at http://hunterandbard.com
Bibblio does internal site recommendations - think Netflix recommendations for content learning sites that have a subscription model. This is something that a lot of companies need, but they are a startup. Today Shira and Mads, the CEO of Bibblio, talk about information, its distribution, how it figured out it's pricing model, and gaining awareness in a market.
Please rate this podcast.
The SaaS Insider podcast is brought to you by Hunter & Bard, a marketing agency specializing in design, branding, content and marketing automation – helping SaaS companies reduce their marketing debt. Check out Hunter & Bard today at http://hunterandbard.com
About Mads Holmen
Mads Holmen is the co-founder and CEO of Bibblio, an SaaS API which helps publishers and content platforms deliver smarter content discovery to their users, reducing churn and improving user satisfaction. Bibblio’s clients include National Geographic, JSTOR, Open Learn and a vibrant community of smaller platforms.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, teen and tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
Webinars. So many companies do them, few do them well. Mindtouch has found a winning formula in their Influencer program. Hsin-Ju Chuang discusses webinars and other influencer outreach on today's show.
If you enjoy SaaS Insider, please rate us.
About Hsin-Ju Chuang
Spearheaded the creation of Mindtouch's influencer channel. Purpose is to promote brand awareness, build partnerships, and generate co-branded, co-promoted content with other companies in the space to drive sales. What she does is reach out to executives - Directors, VPs, C-Level, at companies in Mindtouch's space like Zuora, WalkMe, Zendesk, Influitive, ServiceRocket, Gainsight, etc - and get them to commit to a thought leadership interview with her CEO. She builds out the campaigns, coordinates the co-promotion efforts between MindTouch and the influencer’s marketing team, run the webinar show, and create more partnership & lead generation opportunities.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
How does a company even get started with a Developer Program? What's the benefit of having one? This week Shira interviews Luke Kilpatrick from Atlassian on how to start a developer program, what he's learned has worked and not worked at Atlassian.
About Luke
Luke Kilpatrick is Atlassian's Developer Programs Manager and has been involved in technology and web development since 1996. Prior to joining Atlassian, He held several developer relations and front end developer positions with Sencha, VMware, Tripp-lite, and Kohler.
If you enjoy SaaS Insider, please rate us.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
Julius and Shira talked about SDRs, Marketing Operations and got into the weeds of process and tools.
About Julius Narkus
Julius is a B2B growth and demand generation professional. Originally from Lithuania, Julius has started his startup career while studying for English law degree. As the first employee in two early-stage startups, Julius had helped to expand an Australian B2B testimonial software into the EU market before moving to Silicon Valley in 2014.
Here in San Francisco, Julius joined a AI-powered marketing personalization platform Boomtrain as an SDR, got promoted to lead the Growth team and helped drive company’s 25% quarter over quarter growth. After tackling the Growth team, Julius moved on to the Marketing team to build a marketing infrastructure, execute demand generation campaigns and report on performance, resulting in 30% quarter over quarter pipeline growth.
If you enjoy SaaS Insider, please rate us.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
If you enjoy SaaS Insider, please rate us.
Zhenya from Rallyware is our guest this week. We discuss Rallyware's sales funnel, LDRs SDRs and Sales, the handoffs and what surprised him while testing different things in email marketing.
About Zhenya Rozinskiy
With nearly 25 years of software development experience Zhenya had an opportunity to help grow and make successful many companies of different sizes and different maturity levels. With experience ranging from small startups to leadership roles to such industry giants as Ticketmaster and Experian Zhenya is able to bring together solid understand of scale while remaining nimble and making changes.
As a COO of Rallyware Zhenya is focused on building their sales and marketing processes and improving the sales funnel for a B2B SaaS organization.
About Shira Abel
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, tween sons and a very large Great Pyrenees.
If you would like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - please contact Shira at the URL above.
Jean-Marc is the sole marketer for nGuvu, a gamification platform to engage employees in call centers. That's a very specific market and depending on how easy call center talent is to hire and retain, the value add isn't necessarily immediately understood. Which means Jean-Marc had to educate a market as well as build leads. He's done this successfully for nGuvu through building content. That and more on today's show.
About Jean-Marc
Senior marketing leader with a track record of increasing sales of applications & technology products via creative marketing direction. An expert in software product marketing, product management, search engine marketing, online lead generation, market research, digital communications strategy and portfolio management.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She also has two tween boys, a husband and a very large rescued Great Pyrenees dog and lives with all of them in Silicon Valley.
Akbar Jaffer was the VP Marketing at Social Annex for 2 years, bringing them from marketing debt to process and a scalable lead gen model. In today's show Akbar talks with Shira about what marketing automation software is best for what circumstance, the sales process, and how a rebranding transformed Social Annex. Akbar and Shira also happen to be old friends - so they reminisced a bit as well.
About Akbar
Akbar was recently Vice President of Social Annex, an enterprise software company developing social commerce and customer advocacy solution as a unified platform.
Akbar is an enterprise Software Marketing & Products Executive with proven track record of solid customer and revenue growth, market expansion, commercialization, product launch, and brand management. Akbar brings a unique perspective to marketing technology products with over 20 years experience designing, developing, marketing, and selling software products and services. Akbar has Commercialized 6 products and own's 6 patents. Akbar is passionate about marketing technology and innovation. He is the author of Point of Intersection, a blog about where technology and humanities meet. In Sept. 2016 Akbar spoke at the Internet Marketing Association’s annual conference, Impact16 on the topic of Trends in Content Marketing in 2017 and Beyond.
Akbar studied mathematics and computer science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Kellogg school of management. He also holds advanced certifications in Internet Marketing and Social Media Strategies.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She also has two tween boys, a husband and a very large rescued Great Pyrenees dog and lives with all of them in Silicon Valley.
This week Shira Abel interviews Nicolas de Kouchkovsky (NK3) from CaCube. Nicolas is a SaaS industry veteran who comes from the licensing on premise software world. Nicolas now works as a consultant helping small and mid-size companies in the SaaS Customer Experience space grow. Today they discussed some of NK3's methods, processes and tools he's created for helping companies focus and grow.
About Nicolas:
Nicolas De Kouchkovsky is the founder and principal at CaCube Consulting. He is an Advisor and Consultant to B2B software companies, helping them grow. Nicolas covers all aspects of marketing and market development, working on a project basis or as a VP of Marketing on demand. He spent over 25 years in the Cloud and Software industry as a product and marketing executive. Nicolas has a proven track record of creating differentiated positioning, building go-to-market strategies, and developing demand generation programs. He as extensive experience with Enterprise Software markets and is a recognized expert in customer facing technologies. Nicolas lives in San Francisco, CA.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person. She lives with her husband, two sons and dog in Silicon Valley.
Pere Codina from Kompyte is our guest this week. Shira and Pere talk about what marketing channels work best for Kompyte, how they found their niche and what tactics they use to get leads into the funnel.
About Pere
Co-founder and CEO of Kompyte. He has more than 12 years of experience in eCommerce and Internet. Before founding his first company he also worked in several Internet, engineering & IT companies. In 2006, he founded his first company: Cocosoft Barcelona, and launched several Internet platforms for business, now, every day, hundreds of companies and thousands of users are using those tools. In 2014, he started Kompyte, a Competitive Intelligence tool designed to respond in real time to your competitors' online strategies making easier to monitor all their online channels. He studied Computer Engineering at UPC in Barcelona, always linked to technology and Internet.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person.
This week Jonathan Friedman, CEO of Reactful, is our guest and Shira Abel, CEO of Hunter & Bard, talks to him about cold-calling sales, the psychology of sales, sales versus marketing and how to build that funnel. They also touch on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and more.
If you'd like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider, ping Shira on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/shiraabel), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/shiraabel) or through the Hunter & Bard website contact us (http://blog.hunterandbard.com/contact-the-hunter-and-bard-team)
About Jonathan
Founded StudentEvents.com which was later acquired by StudyPortals. He interned at Goldman Sachs and Uventure and has a BSc, MSc (Cum Laude) from Rotterdam School of Management & the Wharton School of Business.
Jonathan is passionate about working on projects on the bleeding edge of digital marketing, web analytics and conversion optimization @Reactful. He loves building quality products that make Reactful's customers extremely happy. Ping him if you are in the industry, he'd love to chat.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person.
This week Meira Primes, the CMO of Cloudyn, chats with Shira Abel, the CEO of Hunter & Bard, about being the first CMO inside a company - and the cost of Marketing Debt.
About Meira
The secret of start-up marketing? You need to be equally skilled in coming up with new ideas and concepts, developing the strategy, creating the plan, communicating the message, and rolling up your sleeves to execute, execute, execute.
If you are serious about marketing, launching a start-up or you have cool ideas to knock around-reach out. Always happy to talk innovation, ideas, entrepreneurship, public relations & awareness, and anything marketing!
Meira enjoys building and influencing markets, products, companies. Developing and implementing targeted and hard-hitting marketing and revenue generation programs for emerging businesses and tomorrow's market leaders. Interested in helping companies get their concepts and products launched, financed, sold and geared for accelerated growth.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person.
Kristian Valk from HotelChamp was interviewed by Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard on this show. They discussed how HotelChamp has gone from idea to product and from a few clients to clients worldwide - all from Amsterdam. Kristian talks about why he prefers having people in an office instead of remote workers, and gets explicit on HotelChamps sales model.
Kristian Valk
Kristian Valk is the Founder & CEO of Hotelchamp. After 15 years as an entrepreneur in the Ecommerce market, Kristian is now disrupting the online hospitality market with Hotelchamp. Besides helping hotels increasing their direct bookings, he runs at least 200 miles a month and likes to join marathons in New York, Berlin and Rotterdam.
Hotelchamp
Hotelchamp is a SaaS company that delivers smart technology for hotels to increase direct bookings. By realtime analyzing website behaviour and characteristics of website visitors, the Hotelchamp technology creates unique customer journeys to make every hotel website visit 100% relevant in order to convince visitors making a direct booking. To determine what works best for every hotel, the team of conversion specialists executes a/b and multivariate tests.
Ethan Rasiel, the CEO of Lightspeed PR, is our guest this week. He and Shira discuss PR for the entire show - so if you need to understand the process of PR and how it can work for your business I highly recommend this episode.
About Ethan
A true technology connoisseur, Ethan started his communications career as a journalist – by day as a news reporter for Gannett’s metro and business desk, and by night as host of an AM radio show.
In 1998 Ethan began a nearly 15 year stint at Edelman. He ultimately led a team of 60 as GM and EVP, and counseled a range of clients from startups to brands like GE, Canon, HP and Motorola. While there, he pioneered Edelman Labs, which revamped the firm’s approach to product review programs.
In 2011 Ethan became Director of Communications for Samsung Electronics America, responsible for external communications around all consumer products. While managing five agencies, he introduced several tools to improve collaboration and efficiency both internally and externally.
Ethan co-founded Lightspeed Public Relations in 2013, with the mission to harness the skills and learnings from all aspects of his career – while avoiding bureaucracy and unneeded overhead.
He graduated magna cum laude from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and completed additional coursework in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ethan is host of “Marketing at Lightspeed”, a weekly show on the VoiceAmerica radio network.
He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife.
About Shira
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person.
This week Mark Faggiano from TaxJar talks with Shira Abel about how he sourced, hired and onboarded his remote team as well as how inbound has worked so well for TaxJar.
Mark quit corporate life in 2000 and became an entrepreneur.
Since then he's started 6 companies. Some have succeeded, some not so much. He's the CEO of @TaxJar now and it's a blast. He has an amazing team that's using technology to solve a super complex problem for ecommerce businesses.
Shira Abel is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency. She is also Acting CMO of Cyara. Clients include: Totango, Cyara, Sarine Technologies, Pushbullet, AXA Tech, CloudEndure, AppsGeyser, Pitango VC, Chipolo, Allianz, and more. Creator and host of the SaaS Insider podcast. Creator of the Behavior Engineering Canvas. Mentor at 500 Startups. Former professor of Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College. MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Loves family time, cooking, and travelling. Hates writing about herself in the third person.
This week Shira interviews and advises Sean and Chris Miller from Tubular.io. In a change from most episodes, Shira gave advise and did a bit of mentoring during this podcast - in addition to the helpful information given by the founding team of Tubular.io
Sean Miller is the Founder and CEO of Tubular.io and Simplifyd. Born is Zimbabwe, Sean travelled the world working in the Television Live Broadcast industry before moving to the UK and setting up a creative agency which lead to the development of his now Saas passion in Simplifyd and Tubular. Sean is a tech enthusiast and creative who's all about removing unnecessary complexity which is very much the drive behind his products.
Chris Miller worked in Business Development in South Africa with ELW Global, and delivered successful, procurement, logistical projects and contingency operations in countries such as Senegal, Togo, Mali, Cameroon, Niger and Burkina Faso. A passion for procurement and sales led to his role with Tubular.io where he now focusses in the integration of tubular with enterprises in the US and Europe.
Shira Abel is the founder of Hunter & Bard, an inbound marketing and branding agency, and serves as its CEO. Previously she founded Abel Communications, and provided tech companies business development and marketing services as a consultant. Shira taught Marketing for Startups at Tel Aviv – Jaffa Academic College and has mentored at 500 Startups, Google Campus, Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, and other top accelerators. In addition, she’s spoken worldwide at Fortune 500 companies, conferences and top-tier universities on marketing. She also volunteers a few weeks of her time a year to USAID, where she mentors and teaches startups in developing regions. Shira holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.
Szymon Klimczak, the CMO of LiveChat is interviewed by Shira Abel of Hunter & Bard. Szymon didn't come from SaaS, but that didn't stop him from having a quant point of view and growing LiveChat from 0 to 15,000 SaaS customers.
Szymon has spent last 16 years growing sports, web-hosting and customer service software projects. Since late 2005 he’s been with LiveChat, which he pivoted into SaaS product and took from 0 to over 15,000 customers with zero-budget marketing approach. When not focused on the analytics and growth of the customer base at LiveChat, he follows the NBA and plays with stats in Fantasy Basketball leagues. He’s also an investor and advisor in another SaaS company, Brand24.com.
Shira Abel is the CEO of Hunter & Bard - a SaaS marketing agency.
Tim Matthews from Incapsula (https://www.incapsula.com/) chats with Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard (http://hunterandbard.com/) about how he got into SaaS marketing from conventional marketing, the differences between and the special challenges SaaS marketers face when companies scale.
Tim has an ebook called The SaaS Marketing Handbook and it's free - you can find it at:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/274418815/The-Saas-Marketing-Handbook
Tim Matthews was born in New York City and grew up in a nearby leafy suburb before taking the long route to Silicon Valley through Tokyo. He has worked in high tech for twenty years and managed marketing teams at six companies. When not writing or poring over marketing texts, he golfs, crosswords, and tries to keep up with his wife on a standup paddleboard. He has long wondered which is harder: crossing the chasm or a 200 yard carry over a water hazard.
This week Elizabeth Yin (http://blog.elizabethyin.com) joins Shira Abel to talk about Predictable Revenue - how to build it, outbound sales, and being a Partner at 500 Startups. There's a lot of helpful information in this show about building and scaling your outbound sales.
About Elizabeth:
In HS: She programmed at other people's startups during the dot com boom in the Silicon Valley.
Early 20s: Elizabeth studied EE & went to business school at age 23. She worked & lived abroad to travel a lot.
Late 20s: She got serious about her career & worked on developer products at Google & side projects.
Early 30s: She got really serious about her career and started LaunchBit, an adtech platform for B2B SaaS marketers. Sold it. She now a partner at 500 Startups & run the Mountain View accelerator..
Jason Crawford from Fieldbook was interviewed by Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard on today's show. Jason gave some great insights on how Fieldbook did usability testing - resulting in a lot of unexpected changes before launching on Product Hunt. He also talks about the value of influencer marketing.
Jason Crawford is the co-founder and CEO of Fieldbook. Interesting things he's done in the past include co-founding co-founding Kima Labs (sold to Groupon in 2012) and running Landing Page Optimization at Amazon. In a previous life, he built supercomputers for biochemistry applications at D. E. Shaw Research. To relax, he reads books about industrial history, and the webcomic Girl Genius.
Shira Abel is the founder and CEO of Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com) a SaaS marketing and branding agency working with fast growing companies.
Dale Clareburt from Weirdly, an HR SaaS company, is interviewed by Shira Abel.
Dale is the Co-Founder and CEO of Weirdly Ltd. Weirdly (https://weirdlyhub.com/) is a SaaS platform that helps businesses put organisational and team culture fit at the beginning of the recruitment process. They believe that recruitment should be fun, engaging and useful and so they've created a product that delivers just that. Its clients range from SMEs to Enterprise across NZ and globally.
Shira Abel is the CEO and founder of Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), a marketing and branding agency that works with fast growing SaaS companies.
Neil Patel from Quick Sprout and Shira Abel discuss how Neil and his partner Hiten have started multiple successful SaaS businesses, his opinion on why he thinks SaaS fees will be eliminated in the future, and how marketplaces will take over.
Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives
Shira Abel is the founder and CEO of Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com) a SaaS marketing and branding agency. Clients include Cyara, Totango, Reach150 and more.