Hiren bootstrapped Tectivity from a smart locker idea into an IT asset management SaaS that competes with VC-funded rivals — with 25 people, zero outbound, and a customer base that refers each other across job changes.

In this episode:

→ Why he pivoted from hardware to software, and the years he wishes he'd gotten back

→ How a two-week feature turnaround beats competitors who "charge for innovation"

→ The $900K his team saved one enterprise from a couple of reports on mobile phone usage

→ The security breach that hit them four years ago — and how they rebuilt trust with SOC 2 and forensics reports

→ Why founder-led support stops working, and when to actually step back

→ How 90% of growth comes from SEO and referrals — with zero cold outreach

For founders building bootstrapped B2B SaaS in crowded, well-funded categories.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:06 — Introduction & Hiren's Background

1:10 — How the Smart Locker Idea Was Born

2:05 — Pivoting from Hardware to SaaS

2:29 — Why Hiren Chose to Stay Bootstrapped

3:44 — Founder-Led Support on Slack: Sustainable?

4:41 — Customizing the Product for Each Customer

6:35 — Word of Mouth as the Primary Growth Engine

9:54 — SEO vs. AI Search: What's Actually Driving Traffic

14:03 — The Security Breach & Lessons Learned

15:47 — Building Remote Culture with a 25-Person Team

20:24 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Final Hack

🎙️ Hiren Hasmukh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiren-teq/

Teqtivity - https://teqtivity.com/

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Karel Papik spent 20 years making video games and then discovered that gaming principles for hooking users in the first hour are more advanced than most B2B onboarding. He brought that thinking to Product Fruits, then scrapped the entire roadmap to rebuild it around AI.

We get into why his investors offered more money within 24 hours of hearing the pivot, how "forbidden mechanics" from gaming translate into SaaS adoption, why he stopped doing outbound and content entirely — and why he now tells founders to stop listening to customers about the future of their product.

For SaaS founders, product managers, and operators thinking seriously about onboarding, AI adoption, and how to grow without chasing every trend.

In this episode:

→ Why investors offered more money within 24 hours of the AI pivot

→ How gaming "forbidden mechanics" translate to SaaS adoption

→ Why they stopped doing outbound and content — and what replaced it

→ Personalizing onboarding at the user level, not the segment level

→ Why founders should stop asking customers about the future

→ The personal cost of critical thinking and going against consensus

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:00 — Intro & Karel's Gaming Background

1:13 — From Video Games to SaaS: How Karel Found Product Fruits

3:17 — Gaming Principles That Apply to SaaS Onboarding

6:59 — Why Product Fruits Went All-In on AI

9:19 — AI Personalization & How Elvin Works

15:07 — The "Annotation" Method: Teaching AI About Your Product

20:33 — Data Privacy & Why Customer Data Stays Separate

21:40 — Dealing With AI Uncertainty & Pricing Changes

22:58 — Growth Strategy: PPC Over Content

26:21 — Biggest Win: The Bold Bet on AI

29:17 — Founder Hack: The Power of Critical Thinking

🎙️ Karel Papik - linkedin.com/in/karelpapik

Product Fruits - https://productfruits.com

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

Mark Walker has been a litigator, a music industry lawyer, and a repeat SaaS founder — and he's now CEO of Nue, the revenue orchestration platform quietly running the billing stack for most of the major AI companies you've heard of.

We get into why customers come to you looking for reasons not to buy, how one Nue customer had $2M unbilled and didn't know it, when Stripe is genuinely enough and when it isn't, why seat-based pricing was never really right — and what Mark thinks are the only real moats left in SaaS.

For SaaS founders thinking about pricing, billing complexity, or what their revenue stack should look like as they scale.

In this episode:

→ Why customers come looking for reasons not to buy

→ How to find and fix revenue leakage (one customer: $2M unbilled)

→ When to invest in revenue infrastructure — and when Stripe is enough

→ Why seat-based pricing was never the right model

→ Lessons from selling his last company

→ Why distribution and data are the only real moats left

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:24 — Introduction: Mark's Unconventional Path to SaaS

1:08 — First Startup Blanketware: Ahead of Its Time

3:21 — What Is Nue? Revenue Orchestration Explained

4:27 — Who's Running Nue: The AI Company Client List

5:44 — Pricing for the Fastest-Growing Companies in the World

9:13 — When to Invest in Revenue Infrastructure

16:08 — How to Price Your Product (and Stop Leaving Money on the Table)

22:40 — Usage-Based Pricing: Hype or Reality?

26:48 — Revenue Leakage: What It Is and Why It's Costing You Millions

35:36 — Lessons from Acquisitions and Exits

39:19 — Biggest Failure and Biggest Win

44:08 — The Hack: Sell by Addressing What They're Afraid Of

🎙️ Mark Walker - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markwalker/

Nue - nue.io

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Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup and then spent a decade realizing he forgot to say "for the better." In this one he breaks down what's actually missing from the way founders build companies, and what to do about it before it's too late.

We get into why it's always too early to set up governance until suddenly it's too late, the two-page legal filing most founders skip for no good reason, the study showing AI made developers 19% less productive while feeling 20% more, and what Samsung's refrigerator strategy says about cycle time.

For founders, operators, and anyone building something they actually want to protect.

In this episode:

→ Why governance is always "too early" until it's too late

→ The two-page filing that protects mission (and why founders skip it)

→ How surrogation destroys great companies — and why mission is the cure

→ The study: AI made developers 19% less productive (they thought they were 20% faster)

→ What Samsung's refrigerator strategy teaches about lean startup

→ Why "just give people what they want" is harder than it sounds

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Why Lean Startup Still Matters After a Decade

3:47 — What Lean Startup Left Out (and Why Eric Wrote Incorruptible)

8:25 — The Danger of "Change the World" Without Saying "For the Better"

14:51 — Why It's Never the Right Time to Protect Your Mission (Until It's Too Late)

17:51 — The Gruff Founder Who Secretly Had a Mission All Along

20:22 — The Builder's Intuition vs. Shareholder Primacy

22:03 — How to Structurally Protect Your Company's Values from Day One

28:26 — Surrogation: When Metrics Replace the Mission

35:56 — The AI Mania: Demos Without Products and LLM Psychosis

44:51 — How Leaders Actually Learn to Use AI (The Two-Week Hack)

54:09 — The Real Hack: Just Give People What They Want

🎙️ Eric Ries - linkedin.com/in/eries

Lean Startup - theleanstartup.com

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J.Y. Delmotte co-founded six startups, went through YC, and is now running BuddiesHR — a suite of Slack apps doing $56K MRR. In this one he gets unusually specific about what's working, what flopped, and what could kill the business.

We get into the Slack Marketplace SEO play that captured 90%+ of inbound (and why it's nearly impossible to replicate now), what happened when he doubled the price twice, the existential risk of building on Slack, and the co-founder split that got lawyers involved.

For SaaS founders thinking about growth channels, pricing leverage, and building a business that can actually be sold.

In this episode:

→ The Slack Marketplace SEO play that captured 90%+ of inbound

→ Why doubling the price twice barely lost any customers

→ The platform risk of building on Slack — and the escape plan

→ Why 40 founder interviews shaped the roadmap before any code

→ The co-founder split that got lawyers involved

→ Selling KarmaLinks and TalkFluence: two acquisitions, smooth handoffs

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & Guest Background

1:18 — Why J.Y Built Buddies HR

2:00 — What Is Buddies HR?

4:14 — Platform Risk & Slack Dependency

14:18 — Growth Channels & Acquisition Strategy

22:32 — Building in Public — Does It Backfire?

27:42 — Revenue, Pricing & Predictability

34:06 — Selling Car Links & Acquisition Lessons

43:57 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Lessons Learned

54:31 — Founder Hack: Monthly Self-Reflection

🎙️ J.Y. Delmotte - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jydelmotte

🌐 BuddiesHR - buddieshr.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

Adnan Malik bootstrapped Software Finder from two people in 2019 to 340 employees with 100%+ growth every year — without ever taking outside funding.

The engine: a human matchmaking layer between confused software buyers and overwhelmed vendors. We get into why 70-80% of B2B software buyers end up unhappy, how a 120-person content team drove 300% organic growth while competitors collapsed, and the mid-market sales mistake costing SaaS founders their margin.

For SaaS founders, operators, and marketers who want to understand how marketplaces actually scale.

In this episode:

→ Why most B2B software buyers end up dissatisfied

→ The chicken-and-egg problem and the first-mover edge of starting in health IT

→ How content scaled to 300% organic growth while competitors dropped

→ Why 90% sales / 10% marketing is the costly default for mid-size SaaS

→ AEO in practice — and why Adnan calls it "glorified SEO"

→ The personal cost of scaling from 100 to 340 employees

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & Guest Welcome

0:49 — What Software Finder Does & How It Started

2:01 — The Business Model: Free for Buyers, Paid by Vendors

5:58 — Solving the Chicken & Egg Problem

9:21 — 5 Years of 100% Growth — What's Driving It

14:43 — SEO Investment & Organic Traffic Wins

17:04 — AEO & How LLMs Are Changing Buyer Search

20:48 — Biggest Mistakes Vendors Make with Buyers

25:22 — Why Brand & Reviews Matter Before the Sale

26:32 — Review Manipulation & How to Build Trust

30:49 — Founder Burnout & Managing Rapid Growth

33:49 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Lessons Learned

36:38 — Advice for Bootstrapped Founders Today

Adnan Malik - linkedin.com/in/adnanmalik1

Software Finder - https://softwarefinder.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #17 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Aaron Gibson has exited two companies, turned down VC funding, and built Hurree — a data analytics platform — by obsessing over one thing: showing users value before they quit.

In this episode:

→ Why Aaron thinks moats are "a lot slimmer than they used to be" in the AI era

→ How anonymous pulse surveys exposed a culture problem he didn't know he had

→ Initiatives that changed team retention

→ His framework for knowing when to double down on a growth channel — and when to kill it

→ Why he doesn't expect his team to love their jobs, and what he expects instead

→ What serial founders actually build toward when they're "not building for acquisition"

For bootstrapped founders, operators, and anyone building a team-first SaaS business in a crowded market.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & What Hurry Solves

3:20 — Aaron's Background & Journey into Tech

4:45 — The Origin Story of Hurry

6:38 — Showing Monster Value Before Users Churn

10:12 — Using AI Internally & in the Product

11:55 — Measuring AI Success

14:04 — AI & Hiring: Is It Changing the Team?

17:20 — Building a Strong Culture as a Startup

29:22 — Growth Strategy: Bootstrapped & Customer-Obsessed

30:37 — Account-Based Marketing & Go-to-Market Strategy

34:30 — Building for an Exit — Lessons from Two Acquisitions

37:50 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Founder Hacks

🎙️ Aaron Gibson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronhurree/

Huree - https://www.hurree.co/

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #16 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Leo Goldfarb, co-founder of Albato — a 100% bootstrapped automation and integration platform with 200,000 users and 80 people — after years at Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Booking.com. This episode gets into what it actually takes to build an AI-first product when you're competing with Zapier and nobody on your team has formal AI experience.

In this episode:

→ Why Albato deliberately pivoted away from competing with Zapier head-on — and what they built instead

→ The AI copilot that kept crashing, and the API redesign they had to do before it could work

→ How to spot an AI skeptic on your team before they slow everything down

→ Why 95% of enterprise AI investments fail — and the metric mistake behind it

→ The case for decentralizing AI across every team, not siloing it in an innovation lab

→ What "pump your tires before tuning your car" means for founders bringing AI into legacy products

This one's for founders and operators navigating the gap between AI hype and what it actually takes to ship something that works.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction: Meet Leo from Albato

1:35 — From Corporate Life to Co-Founding a Startup

6:30 — What Albato Does & 7 Years Bootstrapped

10:44 — The B2B Pivot: Albato Embedded

18:53 — Building AI Without Dedicated AI Engineers

27:38 — Mistake #1: The AI Skeptic on Your Team

35:54 — How to Actually Measure AI ROI

42:27 — Biggest Win & Biggest Failure at Albato

49:07 — Founder Hack: Trust Your Team, Let Go

54:10 — Fix Your Foundation Before Adding AI

Leo Goldfarb - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leo-goldfarb-7b743449/

Albato - albato.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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