Lean and Mean SaaS

The episode contains a handful of genuinely useful operational nuggets - the SaaS acquisition 'dead zone' between $100k - $1M ARR, the multi-app marketplace real estate strategy, and alphabetical naming hacks for app stores - but these are interspersed with standard advice (support matters, give things time) and the conversation loses focus when the host pivots to discussing his own products at length.

“somewhere between that like a hundred, 100k and a million in ARR. That is like a no Man's land dead zone. There's no...The financial buyers are like, uh, it's a little bit pricey for me to just be spending like a million dollars on something and then the private equity is like, this is way too small for me.”

“if you have an app in the Zendesk marketplace, um, you know, some people will find it, but if you have five apps in the Intercom Marketplace, chances are they're going to find one of those apps. And then once they've...Now that you've got them to come into your funnel now, you, you can essentially use, uh, you can essentially remarket all of those other apps to those people”

The alphabetical app-naming trick and the dead-zone acquisition framing are genuinely non-obvious; however, the majority of topics - VC vs. bootstrap tradeoffs, the importance of customer support early on, SEO lag effects - are extremely well-trodden in the indie SaaS space and offer no contrarian angle.

“we actually changed the name of our app to, um, Feedback by User Feed. So, uh, so we could move up the move up”

“you lengthen the football field right now all of a sudden when you could have scored a touchdown, you were 20 weight, 20 yards away from a touchdown. Now you're a hundred yards away from a touchdown”

Landon is a genuine practitioner who has bootstrapped, operated, and exited real SaaS businesses, giving him credible first-hand perspective; however, the scale remains modest (sub-$1M products, small team) and he is not a recognised operator who has done this at significant scale, limiting the authority of his claims.

“Adriform has done millions of revenue over the year and is used by some of the biggest companies in edtech”

“we sold user feed in 2021, um, and the new owner...it sounds like they had a lot of um, things going on and User Feed was like one of those things”

There are concrete data points scattered throughout - 20 discovery meetings in a week, the 3 - 5x revenue multiple for sub-$100k ARR businesses, the app renamed to 'Feedback by User Feed' - but key claims like 'millions of revenue' remain vague, and the second half of the episode shifts to the host's own product details rather than the guest's verified experience.

“I got, I booked, I think probably like 20 meetings in like a week, uh, without a product”

“anything below like a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, really easy to sell...you could sell it for probably like 3 to 5x revenue multiple”

The host asks a few reasonable follow-up questions early on but never challenges any claims, and the conversation notably collapses in the second half as the host dominates with extended monologues about his own Zendesk apps - effectively reversing roles - while the guest is left asking questions back; there is no productive disagreement or probing anywhere in the episode.

“So it used to be just me M. Now I have someone that's working on Babel and Babel and product so she's doing most of the product work and uh, front end work and then I do the. Right now I'm doing the automations”

“What's the best piece of Advice you got related to other form User Feed in your startup journey”