How I Launched This: A SaaS Story

This week, Carter Morgan (@carterthecomic) speaks with Sacha Labourey about enterprise software delivery company CloudBees. CloudBees enables developers to focus on what they do best: Build stuff that matters, while providing peace of mind to management with powerful risk mitigation, compliance and governance tools. CloudBees streamlines the software delivery management process for companies.

Sacha starts the show with a thorough explanation of how CloudBees saw a need in the market and filled it. Previously, companies would take months or years to get their software products out there, often guessing at what customers need. With CloudBees’ continuous integration and delivery processes, companies can now evaluate customer needs, build and adjust useful products, and get them to market quickly. By allowing companies to codify team roles and knowledge and integrate with hundreds of tools, enterprise software can be automated and secured, decreasing time to market.

Later, we talk about CloudBees’ specific offerings for different types of enterprise customers. Sacha details the process to build, iterate, improve, and deliver software quickly, all while efficiently managing the team members and tools used. We learn about the compliance and security measures in place to help clients not only work quickly but safely.

CloudBees continues to grow and expand their offerings, and we talk about what’s in store for the future. Sacha graciously shared stories of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, from getting the first customer to continually improving and learning from the lows while celebrating highs. Covid has impacted many businesses, and Sacha shares how CloudBees has handled this curveball.

We wrap up the show discussing the special relationship between CloudBees and Google and the changes customers can expect from CloudBees in the future.

Episode Links:
CloudBeesSoftware Delivery ManagementKubernetes

Welcome back to How I Launched This! Stephanie Wong (@stephr_wong) is back this week hosting Joe Fuca of Reputation.com. Their advanced algorithms based on years of machine learning experience help companies find, manage, and maintain their online brand presence.

With his history growing companies into worldwide successes, Joe starts the show telling us about his fascinating experiences with category creation, from infancy to acceptance to widespread use. His current work at Reputation has brought him to the feedback economy, which he says is still growing. As more users leave reviews for various companies and services, these organizations are beginning to realize the benefits of customer opinions. Reputation.com is able to aggregate feedback from online reviews, surveys, social media, phone calls, and more to create Score X for industry-specific companies. This score allows users to directly compare vendors of the same industry and lets companies know how they're doing relative to their competition. It helps companies be found by customers as they research which doctor to use or car dealership to patronize. In addition, Reputation is providing businesses with specific, real-time metrics they can act upon to enhance the customer experience.

Joe tells us more about the progression of Reputation from novel idea to powerful tool. He talks about how changing technologies have affected the company and how they've been able to adapt and build a better product. From their start in personal reputation management to their current enterprise offering, Reputation.com has taken advantage of cutting edge technology to collect and analyze pertinent data. General Motors, a big client of Reputation, is a great example of how the company has integrated and adapted their platform for their enterprise clients.

Later, we talk about how 2020 has changed Reputation.com and how they're keeping up with the increased traffic the year has brought. Joe offers valuable advice to other company heads as they deal with Covid-19 and drives home how important customer loyalty is in these trying times. The future of Reputation.com will see a fun rebranding that really expands the reputation experience management platform.

Episode Links:
Reputation.com
DocuSign

Stephanie (@stephr_wong) and Carter (@carterthecomic) are back with a new episode of How I Launched This: A SaaS Story. This week, they welcome a Google For Startup Accelerator participant and a Google Black Founders Fund recipient, Melvin Hines, Founder and CEO of Upswing.io. Upswing.io began as an online tutoring platform to assist underserved students and has since scaled to create a full service, 24/7 online student support system that empowers underserved and nontraditional students to complete their education.

With a strong focus on online and non-traditional students, Upswing is harnessing the power of the internet to create a level playing field in the education space. Melvin's strong parental role models encouraged him to attend law school, where he began to raise awareness of education inequality. Later, while earning his MBA, Melvin began planning Upswing.

Melvin explains how Upswing works, giving us an overview of Upswing's three Rs: Reach, Relate, and Retain. Reach means Upswing meets the student where they are. Upswing provides a virtual assistant, Ana, to help organize schedules and check in with student progress and mental health. Relating to the problems nontraditional students face, Upswing helps Retain students by providing tutoring services and facilitating other student support offered by the education institution at no cost to the students.

Later, Melvin tells us about Upswing's evolution to a full-service system, describing the early struggles and how they were overcome. He talks about the importance of finding good partners that share the vision and can help advance the mission. We touch on how race can affect entrepreneurship and how minority mentors and celebrities are working to level the playing field.

As a member of the Google Accelerator Program, Melvin tells us how the mentorships and connections have helped grow his business. We talk about how Covid has created a world of nontraditional students and the ways this has changed Upswing. Upswing continues to evolve, and in the future, will offer enhanced mental health aid through a partnership with Metta and better online support for financial assistance.

Episode Links:
Upswing.ioGoogle For Startup Accelerator ProgramGoogle for Startups Accelerator: Black FoundersGFS Black Founders Fund BlogGFS Black Founders Fund RecipientsMeta

Stephanie (@stephr_wong) and Carter (@carterthecomic) are back this week with TrueFit Co-Founder and CCO, Jessica Murphy. TrueFit is revolutionizing online clothes shopping experience utilizing a data collective of size, fit preference, body shape, gender, brand preferences to precisely pinpoint the customer's true size. When retailers personalize every part of the journey, customers gain confidence in the seamless online shopping experience.

Co-Founder Jessica Murphy starts the show explaining a little more about how TrueFit came to be and how the program collects customer information and product information, analyzes the data, and brings the customer to the perfect fit in each particular brand. With this data, TrueFit goes a step further, offering style recommendations for your size and shape as well. Standardization between brands is a benefit of the program, helping customers find similar products across brands.

We talk a bit about data security and why building trust with companies and shoppers was so important to the growth of TrueFit. Jessica describes how her lack of technological experience at the beginning was no hindrance, explaining that a lot of the logic behind the algorithms now used was developed by her early on. Jessica and her Co-Founder, Romney Evans, learned software as they went, hiring friends and developers along the way.

As the company migrated to Google Cloud, important decisions had to be made, and Jessica tells us about this journey. She describes challenges they faced, including the rapid growth they've seen since the start of the global pandemic.

A first-generation Colombian in America, Jessica reflects on how family and cultural traditions shaped her as an entrepreneur. We touch on diversity in SaaS companies and why it can be a crucial component of a successful business and is vital to a successful AI model.

To wrap up the show, Jessica gives us her thoughts on the future of data, AI, and internet companies and offers some great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Episode Links:TrueFit

Welcome back to How I Launched This, A SaaS Story. This week, Stephanie (@stephr_wong) has the pleasure of speaking with Mario Ciabarra, Founder and CEO of Quantum Metric. Quantum Metric specializes in collecting, analyzing, and understanding real-time consumer behaviors with regards to technology.

Mario, an entrepreneur from childhood with a background in molecular biology and biochemistry, has used his extensive skills as an engineer and computer scientist to advance the goals of four start-up companies. His main passion is with enterprise clients, identifying potential problems and solving them with new business ideas. In his latest entrepreneurship adventure, he has created Quantum Metric to help enterprise companies better understand their clients and adjust their offerings to maximum client retention. As people depend more and more on technology to fulfill their shopping needs, it's vital for companies to gauge consumer interactions with technology. It's equally important that this data be easily read and interpreted by businesses so the proper steps can be taken to optimize customer experiences, and Quantum Metric is making this a reality.

We talk more about Mario's time at Quantum Metric and his appreciation for the great company culture they've created. He tells us about continuous product design and the importance of creating a business culture that empowers people to make decisions, allowing the company to change and grow quickly. By essentially taking the idea of DevOps and transposing it on the functions of a business, both the technology side and business side can run quickly and efficiently.

Later, Mario gives us great examples of customers using Quantum Metric and continuous product design to take their companies to the next level. Stephanie and Mario dig into the tech side of Quantum Metric and share which Google Cloud products they utilize.

Mario wraps up the show with a look ahead at the future of SaaS companies and offers some advice for other new businesses.

Episode Links:
Quantum Metric
Continuous Product Design
BigQuery