The nominations are in for the SaaS Podcast Awards.
We want to thank the whole community for nominating their favorite podcasts and stories from SaaS focused shows.
We got tons of nominations and have boiled those down to the top 5 nominees in each of the following categories:
Best Founder/Company Story
Hearing the stories of founders building bootstrapped SaaS isn’t just inspiring, but it can help shape the roadmap of others makers for the better. The stories shared by our nominees celebrate the successes, dissects the failures, and provides a behind the scenes look at some of the most successful startups out there.
Best Episode
With nearly 700 episodes shared between the top 5 shows nominated on this list, there is a dearth of excellent stories, tactics, and recommendations shared by the hosts of these podcasts. A consistent thread excellent story telling and self care focused episodes tops the best episode category. The nominees are:
Code Story - S2 E7: Ryan Graciano, Credit Karma
Early on in his life, Ryan Graciano aspired to be many things – law, writing… and eventually coding, of course. Fun fact, he is an accomplished dog trainer. focusing on animal behavior modification – and more recently, has gotten into powerlifting. Despite his love of analog activities, he got started coding right after college, and tried to avoid joining IBM… yet, still did, through an acquisition. After a few years of growth, he met a group of entrepreneurs who had an idea to provide credit scores to millions of users… for free. This idea would eventually become Credit Karma.
The Feelings Episode
Michele and Colleen dive into striking a balance between business, founder, and lifestyle fit, and the trade-offs of running your own business versus working for someone else.
Good Leadership is Ongoing Work
Good leadership is a hard subject. There is no single way to lead well, and to be a good leader, you must be consistent.
Writing Code to Sell $200,000/Month of Cookies with Sam Eaton of Crave Cookie
When Sam Eaton hears a new idea, it's all he can do to contain his excitement and dive right into the code. So when his sister told him she wanted to start a cookie delivery business, there was never any question that he'd apply his indie hacker skills to help out however he could. And to great effect — today they're selling hundreds of thousand of dollars worth of cookies every month. In this episode, Sam and I discuss the advantages of target your local community as a niche, ways to leverage scarcity and social proof to increase sales, and how software engineers can best apply their skills to selling products in the real world.
MemberSpace: Bootstrapping a Profitable SaaS Company – with Ryan Bennick & Ward Sandler
Ryan Bennick and Ward Sandler are the co-founders of MemberSpace, a SaaS product that lets you easily add membership functionality to your existing website.
In 2010, Ryan and Ward were working in enterprise sales for a tax and accounting startup.
They didn't enjoy their jobs and often talked about starting their own software company. But they could never find a great business idea. And neither of them knew how to code.
So they bought a book about HTML and decided to teach themselves how to code. A year later, they got their first paid gig building a website for Ward's uncle who was an attorney.
Over the next few years, they slowly grew their consulting business. And eventually, they focused on building Squarespace websites for clients.
One day while looking through a Squarespace forum, they noticed that a lot of people were asking how they could password protect pages on their website.
So Ryan and Ward built a simple tool. It didn't do much, but it solved that problem. And people loved it. So they kept listening to their users and making the tool better.
About 5 months after releasing their tool, they had their first paying customer. It had taken 6 years, but they finally had a software business and their first customer.
In this interview, we talk about how they launched their SaaS product, how they use customer support as a way to differentiate themselves and how they've bootstrapped a multiple 6-figure and profitable business.
It's a great story that I think you'll enjoy, especially if you're in the early stages of building and growing your SaaS business.
Best Host(s)
Guiding the stories that their shows aim to deliver, the hosts of SaaS focused podcasts are often times the founders of their own bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS companies. The nominees are:
Best Podcast for SaaS Founders
Our top prize for Best Podcast for SaaS Founders rounds off the list of categories that we received hundreds of nominations for. This list represents some incredible talent and shows that have helped thousands of SaaS bootstrappers over the years. The nominees are:
It’s time for you to vote for your favorite.
You will be able to vote for one nominee for each category. We will tally up the votes over the next week and will announce the winner of the first ever SaaS Podcast Awards by the end of the year!