The Difference Between Scaling Revenue and Scaling Profit with Cem Atik #245
SaaS District · 2026-06-19 · 35 min
Substance score
42 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
What our scoring noted
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
Insight Density
Some useful operational points (first-order profitability, calling longest clients, reviews mentioned 3-4 times signal a fix), but much of it is repeated platitudes about listening to your audience, churn, and customer support, with heavy repetition.
No one gives a damn about revenue. No one cares about revenue. The only thing which is important actually is EBITDA
good customer support is reducing the churn by at least 20%
Originality
The CAC/LTV, EBITDA-over-revenue, and 'listen to your customers' messages are well-worn in B2B circles; the AI-cuts-too-early-where-a-human-rides-the-bull point is mildly fresh but otherwise recycled.
you have a really expensive hobby
AI is more data driven than I could ever be... AI would cut it because it's not— the metrics are not properly like they should be
Guest Caliber
Co-founder/CMO of an investment/operations firm that buys majority stakes in companies, so genuine operator experience exists, but no concrete track record, scale, or named portfolio outcomes are given to substantiate it.
co-founder and CMO of Harukan Ventures
buying at least 51%, I mean, that's a core of our principles
Specificity & Evidence
Mostly illustrative hypothetical numbers ($100 sub, $50 CAC) rather than real data; the one named case (Hush weighted blankets with 5,000-6,000 calls) is the strongest concrete example, but it's e-commerce and lightly sourced.
the average subscription fee is $100, and I pay $50 each customer
the brand Hush... calling their customers really like 5,000, 6,000 calls
Conversational Craft
The host asks reasonable follow-ups about thresholds and CAC/LTV dynamics, but largely affirms and restates the guest's points rather than pushing back or probing for evidence; ends with generic rapid-fire questions.
At what point do you say, okay, this is not... no longer worthwhile to continue to scale
what are the first signs you look at?
Conversation analysis
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.
Filler words
Episode notes
Cem Atik is the Co-Founder and CMO of Harucon Ventures, where he works with fast-growing eCommerce brands that are becoming harder to run as they scale. His focus is on helping companies navigate the stage where revenue increases but margins tighten, decisions slow down, and operational pressure starts to build. At Harucon Ventures, Cem helps rebuild the systems behind these businesses so growth becomes efficient, scalable, and controllable. His work centers on turning complex, high-growth environments into structured operations that are better positioned for long-term scale and eventual exit.
Full transcript
35 minTranscribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about the difference between scaling revenue and scaling profit. And today we have our guest Sam Attik joining us. Sam is the co-founder and CMO of Harukan Ventures, where he works with fast-growing brands that are becoming harder to run as they scale. His focus is on helping companies navigate the stage where revenue increases, but margins tighten, decisions slow down, and operational pressure starts to build up. So at Harukan Ventures, Sam helps rebuild their systems behind these businesses so growth becomes efficient, scalable, and controllable. His work centers on turning complex high-growth environments into structured operations that are better positioned for long-term scale and eventual exit. So welcome, Sam. Super, super excited to have you on the show today. Hey, Akhil, thank you for being here, for being able to be here. So I'd love to hear just a little bit, you know, we're really talking about here, you know, profits and revenue. We're trying to compare the two. I mean, when we're talking on e-commerce, it's a little bit different because you have, you know, higher costs. But we also have, you know, SaaS, we have a lot of infrastructure costs and different costs. So when you're thinking of scaling and you're seeing these struggles internally. You work with companies that look successful maybe from the outside and struggle internally. When does revenue growth start becoming a problem instead of a win, as we usually feel at the beginning? So, I mean, the issue is pretty much the same on every kind of business that you're looking for. In SaaS, you have more overhead. In e-commerce, you have more product costs, as example, or more fulfillment costs and other stuff. So the issues and the bottlenecks are pretty much the same. There is one thing that you just really need to understand when you're just making a business exit ready. No one gives a damn about revenue. No one cares about revenue. The only thing which is important actually is EBITDA. So that means EBITDA, everyone knows that. That's the profit before paying taxes. So that's the secret sauce, you could say. Like, if you have a great EBITDA margin, like, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, yeah, then you just can, yeah, work with that for getting a better multiple. Yeah. So, and yeah, I mean, that's what I learned in the last years. Yeah. Revenue is growing. Revenue is great. But if your margin is not giving you any space for that, yeah, it's basically an instant loss instead of instant win because you can just do like $5 million or even $10 million in revenue annually. Yeah.. But if your EBITDA margin is 5%, or let us say 7%, no one is caring about that. Yeah. Because your business is not healthy to scale because after you reach the 5 or 10 million space, yeah, you are only getting more and more expensive to acquire new customers, right? So your CAC, your cost per acquisition cost is skyrocketing after this point, right? So what happens? Yeah, customers getting more and more expensive. Yeah. Usually people are also not fixing their churn rate. And what happens is you're getting new customers for expensive and the churn rate is still the same and you're losing money. You're bleeding out basically. Yeah, pretty slow, but you're bleeding out. And what's generally the reason why revenue starts dropping around that point? It gets more expensive. And what are some factors that people can look at improving internally to help them keep their EBITDA margins above that instead of staying at the 5-7%? Staying at that 15-20%, especially as they're scaling, right? So the most thing that I see that a lot of founders are missing is listening to their audience, right? So SaaS is always a crowdsourcing project. So you are just building a product for your audience. So that's really something that I would just really recommend everyone who is doing SaaS, build a product for your your audience, not for yourself or because you think this could work great. Don't care about things like this could work great. Ask your audience specifically about what they want, what they need and what would make their life better or their work easier. So that's a really important thing to just understand and just do and know. The next thing definitely is your churn rate. I mean, we all know how churn is, right? And if you are not constantly trying to increase or decrease your churn rate, especially on scaling, when you are just reaching certain points, you will start to lose. Churn rate is something which is really important that you just should always try to decrease over a long term. And the third thing is customer support. Maybe a lot of people don't have this on view, but good customer support is reducing the churn by at least 20%. If a customer is not happy or if they have an issue and you just instantly reply and solve their issue, you leave a positive mark in their brain, right? And leaving this positive mark in their brain is giving them a good feeling and they thinking less about canceling a service which they have positive experience, right? And that's really important. Yeah, absolutely. Especially that last one. I've seen it countless times where we get messages for some of our products and businesses, people wanting to cancel, they're upset, and they have just a good experience, a good conversation. A good support system, and then all of a sudden they're happy, they're actually upgrading. They didn't actually want to cancel. They just wanted somebody to hear them out and solve their issue that they weren't getting heard. Right. So, yeah, I mean, even if it's SaaS and everything is code and numbers and other stuff, SaaS is also a people business and a feeling business. So if you just care about your customers, if you are just cool to them, if you help them with every kind of issues they have, or at least working to fix their issues, they will acknowledge that, they will understand that, and they will appreciate that.. And that's how SaaS should build, right, for your audience. Absolutely. Yeah. And when we're talking about scaling revenue versus scaling profit, right, which is the big piece here, obviously with revenue, in this case, you're disregarding your cost. You're basically taking all your profit, reinjecting it back into your company, and you're not worried about profit. But the other harder part, I guess, is being disciplined and be able to still scale while being profitable. And how do you look at these from an operational perspective internally, and how do you navigate that to be effective and efficient? So actually, that depends from case to case. As example, let us say you have a huge investor in back, right? Then you can just maybe reduce to be being careful about scaling a brand, especially when you know that there is enough cash and they are also into the boat and saying like, hey, just let us grow in revenue, we will cover this part or that part. I mean, there's like different ways how you can do that. But overall, let us say you are bootstrapped, you just have this funded from your own pocket. So then scaling profit should be always your target, right? Your main priority, because every SaaS can scale profitable. You only need to find the way how you do that. And the first thing that you always should do is have just like really good control about your unit economics, right? That's something that a lot of people are not really caring a lot about. So what are you paying each customer? What is your CPL? How much revenue you do? Yeah, how much discounts you give? Yeah. How long is your customer lifetime value? What is the average months a customer is staying with your project, right? And these are all things that you should just really care of. If I know a customer is staying, like, let us say, 12 months, and the average, let us say, the average subscription fee is $100, and I pay $50 each customer I get in and into the boat, I'm first order profitable, as example, right? Usually you are not first order profitable, especially when you're scaling. But let us take this as an example. So let us say you are first order profitable. I know that on the second month, I am in 200% profit. $300, right? So, and what happens here is then you can say, okay, instead of paying only $50, you can go more aggressive. You can do push marketing, like on YouTube ads. Yeah, maybe Meta. Yeah, maybe a bit more outreach. I mean, doesn't matter what you do overall. But if you know that a customer is staying for 6 or even 12 months, you can invest more and try to reach this number a bit more and say like, okay, maybe I'm only yeah, like 10% or even 15% first order profitable. So my margin is really thin, but I know that they in average stay 6 or 12 months. So you just can push more aggressive into marketing or push more aggressive into sales and lower your margin on the first month for winning over the long run. This is something that you should always have in mind. So I was just really thinking about your CAC and being efficient to your LTV, right? So in this case, you're saying, okay, if your CAC you can get for $50,, and then, you know, the LTV in this case, you know, it's $1,200. I mean, yeah, that's an easy win. Um, I mean, I'll take that all day, right? It's an amazing investment. At what point does, you know, you start seeing those margins shrink? Maybe early on you can get, you know, cheaper CAC, but you mentioned like once you get to that $5, $10 million plus, your CAC will go up. Your LTV may go up too as your product expands, people stay longer, maybe able to retain them longer, you reduce your churn, et cetera. But let's assume it stays at $1,200, but your, your CAC goes up. At what point do you say, okay, this is not, it no longer worthwhile to continue to scale or you have to change something else? So let us say we are just, are not first order profitable and within the first 3 months we are not able to be at least breakeven. That's usually a point where I say, okay, stop, we just need to change something. Because if you are not even breakeven on the second or third month, that is something that you just will be hard to scale because we just need to pre-finance 3 months. And if you don't have, I mean, if you are bootstrapped, that is usually pretty much impossible if you do it on the long run. If you have an investor, that's a different story for sure, right? But even with an investor, I would never ever recommend that because there's so many ways where you just can scale profitably even with an investor on board, which is giving you an extra bonus, right? And And then extra for sure, yeah, work capital, yeah, for your working things in your business overall. So yeah, what I usually do is if I see a business, let us say we just want to buy a new business or get shares of a business and I see that they are not profitable within the first 3 months, I usually just check really out what is their churn, figure out why is it, right? One thing which is also like really underrated is checking reviews. Yeah. What are people saying in the reviews? Because especially on SaaS, people are having really specific problems. Yeah. And if I say a problem is mentioned at least 3 or 4 times, then this is an issue that I should fix, right? What is also a thing that I just like to do is calling the longest clients, right? I mean, most people have their phone numbers on their profile and other stuff. So what we do is like calling these guys and asking them what we could do better, right? This is doing two things. First of all, they stay longer. And the second thing is you just get like from your most senior audience, you just get insights that you maybe don't see because you are the developer, you are the SaaS owner which is providing a service, but you are not actively using your service, right? So that's a huge thing that I usually just try to figure out, okay, what could we do better? What is going wrong? Checking the financials. Sometimes it's also like people are just, especially in SaaS, overhead is a huge thing, right? They're just getting like 4, 5, 6, 7 developers on board, which is not bad at all, but developers are really expensive. Yeah. And sometimes it's better to move slowly forward instead of too fast. Yeah. And just grow with the product, grow with the audience and not with the revenue. That's something that I would just definitely also take care of. That's a really good advice. I like to hear. I haven't heard that before, but grow with your audience and not grow with your revenue. But that's very hard, right? A lot of people think of, hey, we're growing revenue, let's grow headcount. You're just saying, hey, let the audience decide. It's like, no, your product is good. Maybe you don't need to make too many changes. And it's like, just work for what you need to make. That's actually a bit old-fashioned. In the past, when you're just looking on like big companies, yeah, bigger headcount means more investment, means more profit, means more revenue. That changed. Yeah. So in the time of SaaS, AI and other stuff, yeah, I mean, especially everything is online in these days. Yeah. You don't need a huge headcount to be a great or a really profitable business. Yeah. And what do you see when you're looking at a company and you're looking to acquire them, invest in them or work with them? How do you— what are the first signs you look at? You see, okay, this company, you know, scaling inefficiently. You see revenue going up and then you see revenue— is this, you know, you mentioned churn as one thing. What else are you looking at? So I usually just check out— the first thing that I like to do is talking with the person who is doing the finances, a CFO or someone who is just really close to the numbers. And asking them a few specific questions shows me exactly if the business is on a good point, or is this business only an expensive hobby? Right. So there is one thing. Let us say we're just talking with a founder who's also doing the finance, right? And I'm asking them how many lead magnets they test in the last 3 months, or how big is their CPL? What is their CAC? And they cannot answer me these questions. The first thing that I usually say is, buddy, you don't have a working business. You have a really expensive hobby., right? Because if you don't have any control about your numbers, if you don't know, yeah, all of these things, that's a big red flag, right? So that doesn't mean that I wouldn't buy the business or didn't like to scale this one. But scaling is always connected with knowing, right? So if you know your numbers, if you know your channels, if you know how everything is performing, you can scale. If you have, if you are just in a black box and don't know these numbers and have, don't, you don't have these information, right? That is something that you cannot do because you would scale blindly. And what happens is that your ROAS is going down. You have no ideas about your margin. There is like, there is not enough information to make data-driven decisions. And if you don't do data-driven decisions, that you are just going bankrupt is pretty much like close to 100%. If you're just asking me. Yeah. Yeah. So you're moving blindly, right? I mean, what you're asking for is we need clarity, right? And numbers give you such clear clarity on it's like, this is working, this is not working. And this is actually worthwhile to invest more. And that's, I mean, that's how you just make, you make better, better investment decisions in the business operationally, how to allocate, where to allocate better, right? And then you can make better decisions in all areas of operations. Correct. Yeah. So how do you kind of work then from there? You come in, you look at, you know, you're talking to the CMO, you look at their growth, you look at their financials, they're growing. Maybe there's, you could see some opportunities to improve margins, some opportunities to improve profitability. And you come and you want to help and rebuild it, how do you kind of work with them from there? What's next steps? So usually we are coming in, we are just first of all checking the numbers, then we're just checking out the processes, right? So what they do to— how are their workflows? Did they have templates? Yeah, even, I mean, it starts on the very first thing. So let us say they have a project management tool, right? So are they using the project management tool really efficiently, right? Maybe it sounds weird, but you can just usually, I mean, every brand that we bought, we get at least like 20% or 30% uplift in efficiency of the team because we just make rules, right? We say like, hey, look here, everyone just needs to check at least 10 minutes on end of the day his board and make, yeah, just need to sort out their task for tomorrow, yeah, and mark tasks that are already done so that we just know, yeah, how we are. And Like, I mean, sounds maybe really simple, but usually it is this really simple things, right? We just go into the processes, figuring out what is working on, yeah, what is not working great, fixing that, making rules. Because I mean, the best developers, even really good ones that I see, they usually have so many things on their plate that they don't have any idea about how they should structure that efficiently. And it's actually not their job. To also structure their tasks because they are really busy with what they are doing. If you can do that for them, if you can lift this heavy, let us say, task from them, they will be so thankful for that. I saw this like multiple times. That's really one thing. I mean, it really depends from business to business. Once you fix the first two things, usually you see like 5% up to 10% more margin is in because you are just doing the groundwork, which was not done before, what you actually need to do when you just built up the business. And then you're just starting with the marketing channels. If the SaaS is doing performance marketing, performance marketing is basically a channel that a lot of people are seeing wrong. Why? Really simple. Performance marketing, everyone thinks like, yeah, if you just do Google Ads, if you just do Meta Ads, you just need to be 100% profitable. Yeah, that's actually a wrong fact. You do profits over— or yeah, in decreasing your churn rate, you do profits over your retention marketing, over email, WhatsApp, SMS, getting people— yeah, just getting another touchpoint from people. Performance marketing is only getting high-quality traffic to your website from people which are interested. Your goal should be trying to convert them as much as possible. And if you are not able to convert them,, then you just need to grab them with retention marketing, right? And this is something that a lot of people are not doing. They do Google Ads, but they don't do email. There is no pop-up on your website. There is no survey. There is no all of these things. But people like to tell people what they should do better. That's a fact, right? So if you're just asking them from the beginning on, when someone is just trying to do a trial, what we could do better, right? They leave their email, their name, their phone number, even Yeah, I mean, they just give you all information that you're looking for if they can only give you feedback. Yeah, because people like to give feedback, even if it's bad or positive, that doesn't even matter, to be honest. Yeah. So, and these are things, all the things you guys are looking at when you're looking at a company and you're thinking whether to invest in them. So I mean, these are lots of opportunities. And like you said, these small things like people overlook is like a lot of people, founders are really good at building great products. Building their initial team, let's say their first 10, but that does not mean they're good at building systems and processes. But processes, like you said, these simple processes, SOPs, project management, having a proper workflow, you know, meetings and rhythms, tracking KPIs, like all these little things, but you set them up properly, it's like, okay, now we know how to scale. And that's how you, you can build and, and make better and scale efficiently. So that's, yeah, super helpful, underrated. And maybe most people should think about that more in their business. I mean, that's basically everything. You just have these tasks and these SOPs in every industry, e-com, local services, SaaS. It's always the same. For sure, the framework or maybe the topic is a different one and you just need to just change a couple of things. But the structure or the main idea, the core idea behind that is always the same. Absolutely. And Sam, what are your thoughts on AI now coming in, you know, in the industry from what you're seeing now when you're looking at businesses? Are you concerned about, you know, AI replacing these? And how are you— maybe another question on AI is how are you maybe using as part of your process for acquiring or improving operational efficiencies as well? Oh yeah, Akhil, really hard. And really, really, yeah, I just need to be really careful when I answer on that because currently I'm just really deep in cloud code for like 2 months and my wife is really unhappy with that, to be honest. But I think AI will make a lot of things easier and will let us think about a lot of things different because I don't think that AI will replace a huge part of SaaS or a lot of people we are working with. But we just need to learn how to use AI, how to work and how to live with AI in the next years. That's something that will be really important because AI can be your best friend or you can be just negative and say like AI is stealing my job or whatever. But this does not change anything, right? So we just need to learn how to work with AI. We just need to learn how to properly scale with AI processes. I mean, you see a lot of tools are coming out like daily. Yeah, there's daily new SaaS models, daily new AI businesses. A lot of people say like, you don't need to do performance marketing any longer because this tool will do everything. I don't think so. I think AI can automate a lot and AI can help a lot. Yeah, but the core decision maker should be still a human because AI cannot replicate feelings. And sometimes, yeah, I mean, I'm a data-driven guy. I don't like a lot of feelings in work. I just try to also just be really calculated in these things. But sometimes we do decisions because of instinct, because of a gut feeling, or because of feelings. And these decisions are sometimes really crucial for our scale. If I have a good feeling and dopamine is kicking in when I scale a brand, as example, with Google Ads, as example, let us say it like that, right? So that's a great feeling and I'm super focused on this situation and I see loopholes or bottlenecks that I can instantly fix, especially in intraday scaling and marketing. Right. AI is doing this too, but AI is more data driven than I could ever be. And what AI is doing, if a metric is not working or if a metric is not like matching the goal that it should be, he's instantly cutting it and maybe we're losing a lot of potential. Potential, especially in scaling when the ROAS is, like, let us say, under 1, right? And you are just scaling something with YouTube. It's sometimes really good to take this and run the bull. So just do the bull run and trying to get more. But AI would cut it because it's not— the metrics are not properly like they should be. Interesting. And so for maybe like last insights around, you know, for founders maybe in this like $1 to $5 million range, right? Let's say they still haven't hit that $5 to $10 million, having not having issues in their scale yet. What's one shift they can make right now to help them move from chasing revenue to focusing on, you know, building a profitable, scalable company? You know, they don't have investors, they're bootstrapped, and they're also using, you know, AI as part of their process. Sounds weird, but talking with your audience is one of my core tips that I can give because that is changing everything. Little story for that. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the brand Hush. Yeah, was a brand in the US. They sell this weighted blankets, right? You know, these really heavy blankets and they run nearly to bankrupt. So what they did is calling their customers really like 5,000, 6,000 calls, right? Asking them what is the issue on their product and what they could do better and what kind of products they would love to see. So they did that, figure out what is working, figured out what their audience loves, launch with their last money a new product. And this is skyrocketing in sales because they do exactly what their audience is doing. So listen to your audience, ask your community, just offer the people who are already trusting you and investing into your tool, yeah, their money to make maybe something easier in their life. Yeah, just talk with them, ask them what could we do, what your SaaS solution could do better, and you will always win. Yeah, talk to your customers as a social media project. Yeah, yeah. So what are you calling them, right? You're saying like call them, meet them if you can, and just like get into them. Insolvable. Yeah, definitely. I think you said most people are usually pretty open. I think a lot of people are scared to get on the phone and jump on a call or meet people and ask that. But you said most people are willing to share. It's like, hey, if you just want feedback, people want to share what they don't like and especially what they don't like. And if they like it, they'll give you that feedback, right? I mean, I understand that it's not easy to call, but let us think about this. So you are calling me right now and saying like, hey, Sam, I'm from Google, right? So you are using our solution. How are you happy with that? Is there anything that we could do to make your life easier? Yeah. And with this point, you're just, yeah, taking the guard down of the person who is on the phone because you just come to him, don't offer him any service. You ask him actively what you could do better to make his life easier. I mean, it's so simple sometimes, but I know, yeah, especially in my first days, it's really hard or maybe a bit difficult if you are not I'm not the most confident person to just talk about these things or even call people. But I mean, you will lose a lot of money, a lot of potential, and you will not be able to figure out your problem, a problem that you maybe have if you don't start to ask your audience. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's super critical. So if folks haven't done that and they're growing their company, pick up, call your customers and see how you can do better today. Appreciate that advice, Sam. Yeah. So Sam, I want to shift gears here as we're ending the end of this episode. Go to the personal rapid-fire questions. Ready for that? Sure. All right, Sam, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into a flow state? Good question. I did judo for 20 years, and I just, yeah, trying to reduce my weight a little bit more that I can start again with it right now. I just spending a lot of time into walking and just shutting my phone off because that is really the only time where I just can just be lonely with my mind and my ideas and all the stuff. And I just writing a lot, to be honest. So walking and writing is, I think, the best thing that I would say, like, outside of work. Yeah, we've heard that a couple of times. A lot of people love that. Walking disconnected from your phone. So simple, so underrated, so powerful. So love it. It's a game changer, definitely. Yeah. Sam, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known? And if you can go back, you would tell your, say, 25-year-old self? Ah, get goosebumps. Really simple. Don't be so friendly. Try to focus more on business because I lose a lot of opportunities with helping people, being too friendly, just trying to be the nice guy, and no one is thankful for that, actually. So be focused on business. Stop being the nice guy. Be the business guy. Something that I would just definitely recommend to my younger self. Yeah, for sure. To be able to separate the business from the personal. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Sam, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow your firm, Rockcon Ventures? Meaning, what keeps you up at night these days? The biggest issues that we usually have is, I mean, it happens from time to time that we invest in a company where the founder has a huge ego. So even if we are just buying at least 51%, I mean, that's a core of our principles, buying at least 51%. That keeps me really up tonight because people are just with ego, they killing their whole scale with that because saying like, hey, I don't think this is so. And I say like, hey, here are the numbers. I don't care about what you are thinking. The numbers are speaking the truth. And even if you are just think that is not the right way, or if you don't feel this is the right way, the numbers say anything. There is nothing that you just can tell me to convince me if you cannot show me the numbers. Right. And there's sometimes like, yeah, that's the biggest challenge that I have, that sometimes the ego of founders, especially people which scaling something from $0 to $5 million or from $0 to $3 million, they have a huge ego because they said, I made it, I killed it. Right. And to be honest, maybe it sounds weird, but scaling something from $1 to $3 million is not that hard. It's only, I mean, 3 things are important. The pace is important. You just need to shift fast. The consistency is important and your execution just needs to be fast. If you just do these 3 things and always do it as long as you find something that works, you can easily scale something to $3 or $5 million in revenue. Sam, who or what are some of the best 3 resources? These can be books, mentors, or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been most instrumental to your success over these last few years. So one of my favorite books is Pitch Anything from Oren Klaff. Not sure if you just read it. Yeah, maybe it sounds weird, but you can do everything in your life and can get funded for everything in your life if you know how to pitch correctly. So I think it's a super powerful book because Oren Klaff has just found, just raised like millions with a really simple strategy. I would just definitely recommend to everyone to read that book. So let me just think. I just hearing a lot of podcasts and other stuff, but in the last time reading is getting a bit less because we're just really busy with what we are doing. Mentors. Good question. That's it. If you don't have any other, that's fine. I mean, there is a bunch of people that I follow and I really like. So one of our investors, a really smart guy called Georg, is a German name, right? He's always like, one thing that he always did in the beginning when we're just building a company is he just set up principles, right? There's principles that you just set up in your business. Right? Doesn't matter what happens, no matter who it is. Yeah, these principles stay over everything. Yeah. And I would say he's one of my mentors in this case because that makes life so much easier because you don't need to complain, you don't need to argue with a worker or with a founder if you have principles. That is just changing the whole game. And I think he's one of my mentors for 100%. Sure. Nice. Love it. Sam, what does success mean to you today? Whether that's personally, business, financial, life, there's no right answer. Yeah, that's actually simple for me. Success is freedom, actually. So if you can spend free time with your wife, with your kids, with your family, that is actually success for me because on some point you just realize that money is really something that is coming with hard work and you don't need more of that. But having the time to spend with the people you are loving, it's getting less and less. And to have a great and fair split there that everyone is happy is, for me, the biggest success, actually. Love it. Yeah. So having that freedom of time to still not feel like you're losing out on spending time with people you want and doing things you want at the cost of business. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, love it. This has been great, Sam. Really appreciate everything you've shared with us. What is the best way for founders who are listening to get in touch with you, learn more about you and Hurracon Ventures? Really simple. The best source to connect me is LinkedIn, actually. I'm sharing daily things which I'm actively working with, which makes my life easier. Yeah, which makes basically, yeah, a lot of, takes a lot of manual work from the shoulders of my team and I. Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely the best source to get in touch with me. Awesome. So we'll add your LinkedIn link to our show notes. We'll also add the book Pitch Anything for everyone who wants to check it out. I'll probably also read it as well. Thanks for that recommendation. And if you guys are looking for a partner or someone to speak and learn more about scaling, make sure to reach out to Sam. So thank you so much, Sam. Appreciate you jumping on today. Thank you for being able to hear. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and see you on the next one.