Sounds Good.
Sounds Good is a podcast where host Anna Nadeina asks the questions you actually wanted answered. She talks to founders and operators about the playbooks, growth hacks, and frameworks the internet swears by — and whether any of it actually worked. Expect real numbers, honest post-mortems, and the occasional confession that the thing everyone recommended was a waste of six months. Topics include SaaS growth, bootstrapped and VC-backed startups, product-led growth, sales-led growth, founder-led marketing, exits and M&A, remote teams, AI tools, indie hackers, and building on the internet.
Episodes
Can you build a company? — Elizabeth McCalley @ StartStak
AI has made it easier than ever to build a product. But has it made it any easier to build a company? Elizabeth McCalley, Founder & CEO of StartStak.ai, thinks we're confusing the two. In this episode, we get into what founders are missing when speed becomes the default. You can vibe code an MVP, launch faster than ever and automate huge parts of the operation — but you still need to know w
The $2M ARR one-person SaaS — Jason Zigelbaum @ Zigpoll
A year ago, Jason Zigelbaum was running a SaaS business at roughly $1M ARR completely alone. A year later, he's approaching $2M — and he's still alone. So, how? Jason is one of the clearest real-world examples of what running an extremely lean SaaS with AI actually looks like. He uses AI to build product, analyze customer behavior, understand churn, identify his ICP, create marketing campaigns,
What is your SaaS worth in 2026? — Dirk Sahlmer @ FE International
Is SaaS dead?Dirk Sahlmer spends his days looking at SaaS businesses through the eyes of buyers — and his answer is no. But the things that make a SaaS company valuable are changing fast.In this episode, we get into what the SaaS M&A market actually looks like in 2026: which businesses buyers still want, what kind of multiples founders can realistically expect, why vertical SaaS is getting mor
Building SaaS after an acquisition — Peter Leonard @ MyWorks
What happens after you sell your SaaS? Peter Leonard founded MyWorks, built it into a successful SaaS business, and eventually joined saas.group through an acquisition. The original plan was simple: sell the company and move on. But Peter stayed. In this episode, we talk about what happens when a founder moves from building and running their own SaaS to becoming part of a larger group — and how
How to make B2B content people want — Renée Shaw @ tl;dv
B2B marketing doesn't have to be boring. Renée Shaw from tl;dv has turned humor, personality, and relentless experimentation into one of the company's most recognizable growth channels. Instead of treating social content as something marketing teams have to “do,” tl;dv built a culture where creators are given the freedom to experiment, fail, and figure out what makes people pay attention. We tal
AI can write code, but only you know what to build — Juan Germano @ Jams
AI has made building software dramatically faster—but it hasn't made building the right software any easier. Juan Germano, founder and CEO of Jams, builds custom web and mobile products with founders and operators. And after years of building software, he's seeing a fundamental shift in how products get designed, built, and launched. We talked about what happens when founders can turn an idea in
The future of SaaS GTM is human (but not all the way) — Roman Hipp @ BetterContact
AI is making software easier to build—and that could be a serious problem for SaaS. Roman, founder of BetterContact, believes SaaS companies increasingly need a real “right to exist” as AI-native companies start rebuilding existing software and aggregating multiple tools into simpler interfaces. We talked about why tool sprawl is becoming a problem, whether SaaS will become increasingly API-firs
The SaaS companies that will survive AI — Martin Gourdeau @Vacation Tracker
AI is coming for SaaS—but probably not in the way most founders think. Martin Gourdeau, CEO of Vacation Tracker, has spent years operating SaaS businesses at very different scales, from a 15-person company to Workleap, where he helped grow the business from roughly 275 to 450 people. Now he's back in a small SaaS company, deliberately testing how far AI can take a business without massively incr
Stop chasing traffic, fix your SaaS funnel first — Simonida Jovanovic
Simonida has made a career out of figuring out why SaaS users don't pay—and she doesn't think throwing more AI, more emails, or more traffic at the problem is the answer. She focuses on one of the most valuable parts of the SaaS funnel: the gap between someone starting a trial and deciding the product is worth paying for. Sometimes moving that conversion rate by just a few percentage points can c
The real cost of building an AI startup — Ricardo Ghekiere @ Patricia
Ricardo Ghekiere bought BetterPic for $1 when the product was still rough, the AI struggled with consistency, and very few people believed AI headshots could become a real business.Less than three years later, BetterPic had grown into a multimillion-dollar company. But while everyone else was celebrating AI image generation, Ricardo was already thinking about what comes next. That thinking led to
Don't add features: how to simplify your SaaS — Jeremy Chatelaine @ MonsterOps
Jeremy has been bootstrapping SaaS products for more than a decade. After building QuickMail into one of the most respected outbound platforms, he's now betting on a much bigger idea: AI won't replace companies — it'll replace the way companies operate. We talked about where AI actually delivers value (and where it absolutely doesn't), why founders are creating technical debt faster than ever, ho
The human advantage: how to give your brand a real voice — Lianna Patch
AI can write. But can it actually persuade customers? In this episode of Sounds Good, Lianna Patch joins Anna Nadeina to talk about what AI is genuinely good at, where Claude and ChatGPT still fail, and why the best SaaS companies are investing more—not less—in brand, personality, and great content. We cover: • Why AI-generated copy still sounds the same • When Claude is actually useful (and w
The $500M SaaS company that doesn't chase AI hype — Ken Weary @ Hostaway
Hostaway has raised more than $500 million. It still hasn't acquired a single company. Ken Weary, COO at Hostaway, believes that's not a missed opportunity—it's discipline. Instead of buying competitors, the company has spent the last decade building a single platform, staying profitable, and resisting the temptation to chase every shiny new thing. We talked about what AI is actually changing in
SaaS isn't dead but old playbooks are — Mac Martine @ Demandbird
Mac Martine has been building and acquiring SaaS for 20 years. He still doesn't think it's easy — and that's the point. We talked about what it actually looks like to run a small SaaS portfolio as a two-person team, why buying a boring Slack backup tool led to Fortune 500 clients and a 50x price increase within 48 hours, and why the fundamentals of distribution haven't changed as much as the hype
You don't need to go shopping ever again — Felix Hoffmann @ 7Learnings
Felix Hoffmann has been inside Zalando's pricing engine. Now he's building the tools retail brands need to survive the AI. We talked about what agentic shopping looks like these days, why European platforms are dangerously slow to react, and why asking "how do I use ChatGPT in my company" is completely the wrong question. In this episode: - Why 30–50% of online purchases already start with an A
Your AI product needs an accountability layer — Sai Dhanak @ deduction.com
Most AI companies make big claims. Sai built a guarantee into the business model. Sai Dhanak is the founder of Deduction, an AI tax firm that pairs licensed CPAs with AI agents to deliver tax advice, planning, and filing for US consumers — at a fraction of traditional accountant prices. We talked about what happens when accountability is actually on the line, why services that were "unscalable" a
Stop the slop. Here's how to do founder-led content — Finn Thormeier @ Project 33
Good content still wins. Finn Thormeier has spent years building LinkedIn presence for B2B executives and he's got a genuinely uncomfortable take on why most of it fails — and it's not the algorithm. Finn runs Project 33, an executive LinkedIn agency working with B2B founders and C-suite leaders to turn their actual opinions into content that moves pipeline. He's obsessed with the gap between wha
Bootstrapping in an over-funded market — Antoine Minoux @ Fernand
What happens to bootstrapped SaaS when AI levels the playing field — and VC money controls distribution? Antoine Minoux, serial founder and builder of Fernand (a customer support tool for founders doing their own support), gets real about what's actually broken right now: UI as a moat is dead, cold email is harder than it looks, and "distribution is king" is not just a cliché anymore — it's exist
Why the Best product doesn't win anymore — Joseph Lee @ Supademo
Your product isn't defensible because it's hard to build. The tough news: you're in trouble. Joe Lee, founder of Super (200,000+ users, growing without a sales team), joins Sounds Good to dismantle the idea that technical complexity is a moat. We get into why distribution and brand eminence are what's left, why "we're just watching AI" stance might have been the smartest move of the year, and why
Don't start SaaS right now — Mike Hill @ Curator.io
Sounds Good Podcast #1 — Mike Hill on whether bootstrapped SaaS is still worth starting in 2026. His advice to anyone asking him right now: don't. Not because SaaS is dying. He doesn't buy that — neither do I. But the gap between building a product (easier than ever) and getting your first SaaS customer (harder than ever) got pretty broken. Mike Hill is a serial bootstrapper. His newest thing is
sounds good. launching June 1
Have you ever heard a podcast, read an article, or just seen a LinkedIn post that sounded really, really good? Where someone was sharing the ultimate playbook that definitely works, the sales process that makes your team indestructible, and that great game changer for SaaS growth?Yeah. We've all been there.I've clicked on those links. And hey, fair enough, some of those did work. And some sent me
