DevReady Podcast

From Surfboard Salesman to Software Innovator with David Pillinger - Episode 70

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony sit down with David Pillinger, a serial entrepreneur who took his experience running a surfboard company and transitioned it into managing multiple software companies.
David started out making and selling surfboards when he left school early, eventually launching an online real estate company called Property Gallery and then a software company called Safesoft in 2018. David now heads up his software as a service company, Venture Capital Exchange (VCEX).
Throughout their conversation, David tells Anthony and Andrew about how he started VCEX and the practical side of running the company technology-wise. Together the three discuss how David sources talent from LinkedIn, David’s motivations for getting up and continuing to innovate every day, and how the internet is changing the way we do business.
David believes that anything is possible for anyone—a mindset he draws from his own life and struggling with school, only to go on to become a successful business owner.
The episode wraps up with a look at where David sees himself in five to ten years, and how leaders have to be constantly looking out for “icebergs” on the horizon that could hinder their progress and continued innovation. David’s childlike wonder at opening up the “present” under the Christmas tree that is waking up every day serves as a motivation for all entrepreneurs and innovators alike to keep moving forward.
Topics Covered:
• The story of surfboard seller turned to software innovator.
• How do some regulations tend to make expanding software technology harder?
• How David developed the technology platforms for his different businesses.
• Building the best team.

The road to success in business: Changing your mindset & heartset with Leigh Eggins - Episode 69

On this episode of the DevReady podcast, Andrew engages Leigh Eggins, founder of the Million Dollar Business Club, in a fascinating exploration of holistic coaching.
In what amounts to a paradigm shift, Leigh asks clients to reconsider assumptions and dig around in the shadows to unearth self-limiting beliefs. The result? Tremendous growth not only from a business perspective but in myriad other aspects of life. “At the end of the day, it is a person running the business,” says Leigh, “and if that person’s not performing at their best then the business won’t be performing at its best.” Makes sense!
The question is: How do we get there? Leigh shares some of the tools he recommends to clients, including out-of-the-box ideas like meditation and “heart set.”
If you’re ready to break with received wisdom and get comfortable being uncomfortable, then this is the episode for you. It’s all too easy to get “addicted” to outmoded systems or patterns of thoughts long overdue for re-examination and change.
But we don’t have to stay locked into counterproductive stressors or false beliefs. Leigh and Andrew share tips and illuminate a path towards not only business success but also personal growth and fulfilling life.
Topics Covered:
● Leigh unspools how he came to his coaching philosophy.
● How to get out of our comfort zones?
● What is heart-set and how does heart-set affects brain function and outcome?
● When stress goes up, intelligence goes down.
● Leigh shares the art and science behind a transformational tool “Smile-Posture-Breath/Thank-Trust-Receive.”

How to shorten your sales cycle with Rashid Kotwal - Episode 68

In this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony interviewed Rashid Kotwal, a sales coach and mentor, about how companies can optimize their teams for proficiency and profitability.
Through his consulting firm, Revealed Resources, Rashid is sharing lessons gleaned over 30 years. He has over his career executed complex deals, bringing to bear expertise in both tech engineering and identifying key patterns of human behaviour.
While technologists love to sell technology, Rashid explains that it’s “a huge mistake” to shift the focus away from what is ultimately the heart of solution selling: Making the business case.
Sales cycles can be short or long, but in all cases, it’s important to identify the right decision-makers, articulate their pain points and propose a strategic response.
Enjoy this fascinating conversation about all things sales. Rashid Kotwal provides a template, explaining what it takes to set the stage for your company’s long-term growth and bottom-line numbers that will keep improving … year over year.
Topics Covered:
● The importance of buy-in.
● The art of identifying opportunities and key players to accelerate sales cycles.
● Marketing and sales: Two sides of the same coin.
● Are salespeople born not made?
● The 3 pillars to growth
● Go to strategies for engaging stakeholders, locating pain points and creating a win-win-win scenario that closes sales.

How to Build High-Performance Start-up Teams with Nicola Steel - Episode 67

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony speak with Nicola Steel, IT recruiting expert and founder of JJP Talent Solutions.
During the conversation, Nicola shares her knowledge about how to bring your talent scouting resources in-house to build high-performing teams.
At the heart of building good teams are the people themselves. In order to build a high performing team, you need to attract high performing people. But what a lot of companies get wrong is that they don’t have their own values nailed down first.
The best teams are driven by values and principles, so you must design the values of the company as early as possible. If you have the foundation of principled people, your teams will be set up for success.
Nicola believes in the power of a people-first attitude. When companies place the emphasis on their own people first and their fears, their personalities, their strengths, they will be much more capable of guiding their teams through to victory.
Topics Covered:
● How High-performing teams are values-driven.
● Why being people-first is better than numbers first.
● Creating psychological safety.
● How to celebrate wins as a team.
● Why remote work needs to be looked at on an individual basis.
● The rise of Zoom fatigue.

Understanding the subscription economy with Jonathan Callinan - Episode 66

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, we talked to Jonathan Callinan, business coach, co-founder and marketing strategist at the Online Business Accelerator.
Jonathan discusses the subscription economy, why trust is better than “tribe”, and why you should be building your own communities.
Human behaviour and the world at large is moving toward lifestyles that favour a subscription model for consumer services, it only makes sense that all businesses that want to survive need to think about how to build that into their business plan.
At the heart of Jonathan’s message is the idea that people are drawn into opportunities for networking and community. He explains to us that because of this, your brands are more likely to succeed if they feel they are part of a community.
Topics Covered:
● What underpins successful subscriptions.
● People ultimately want to be connected in the community.
● Trade tribe for trust to be connected to like-minded people.
● Why businesses should be trying to create their own communities.
● The challenges of transitioning a free community to a high-value paid service.
● How to build communities around a target audience.

Close More Deals with SaaS DEAL Framework with Matt Wolach - Episode 65

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony speak with Matt Wolach, SaaS expert and former guest on the show.
During the conversation, Matt explains his philosophy behind The Perfect DEAL process and how to successfully scale SaaS platforms.
The key to a successful sales model is that it is easy to understand and easy to transfer to someone new. Matt talks about how a lot of early wins in the software space are a direct result of the passion of the founders, which is not a bad thing. But that passion isn’t easily transferred to new hires.
This is where the simplicity of the perfect deal process comes in. A repeatable process helps the sales team to grow seamlessly.
Matt explains that the DEAL stands for four key things that must happen on a sales call in order to close. He boasts a 63% close rate on his team after using the Perfect DEAL strategy.
The process is not intuitive, Matt repeats, but it is worth the time to help your SaaS companies really grow.
Topics Covered:
● The Perfect DEAL helps you sell and scale SaaS companies.
● Why existing sales models need to be moulded to fit SaaS.
● A repeatable process to scale your business.
● Getting prospects to feel bad enough about the problems that they want to fix them.
● Cater your SaaS products to specific customer needs and you’ll win.
● How to demonstrate expertise in your niche

A Perfect Space: Becoming Google of Film Scouting with Kate Tiller - Episode 64

In this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony welcome Kate Tiller, Chief Brand Officer at A Perfect Space. Identifying a niche within the entertainment industry, this experienced startup founder set out to develop a searchable database that eliminates much of the legwork involved in scouting film locations. But as with so many startup origin stories, there have been some painful lessons learned along the way to delivering this invaluable service to production teams across North America, Australia and Europe.
Kate generously shares her experience with bringing A Perfect Space from conception to execution, including the disappointments she suffered after partnering (more than once) with tech developers who made promises on which they couldn’t deliver. Short of industry regulation to ensure that coders perform to standard, it’s up to entrepreneurs to protect their vision and the large sums required to turn an innovative idea into a robust web-based solution. Kate explains why both business and tech sides need to be in sync with clear communication, accountability and mutually understood milestones. A Perfect Place couldn’t have realized its potential without a clearly defined, disciplined development framework – something Kate has learned is most efficiently established by hiring an effective CTO from the outset.
While A Perfect Space caters to a very specific sector, the lessons Kate has learned in building out, debugging and populating her platform are universally applicable. With candor and humor, she shares the journey to realizing her vision for “the google of location scouting” -- a searchable database designed to drastically reduce the travel, expense and spade work associated with identifying far-flung locales for all manner of film and television productions. Join Andrew and Anthony in exploring with Kate the many ways in which technologists and entrepreneurs must intersect on the way to turning a business dream into reality.
Topics Covered:
● The challenges associated with scouting locations.
● How specifically A Perfect Space streamlines the scouting process.
● Supporting tech is essential to deliver a disruptive vision.
● Millions of dollars lost and overstating of tech developers.
● Why Big-picture entrepreneurial goals are important.
● The value in creating a hierarchy of needs within a business model.
● Defining and targeting a given market drives the tech tools deployed to reach it.

From Concept to Design: Launching a SaaS Product with Alex Pirouz - Episode 63

Launched in 2013, linkfluencer started initially as a service – an online course that helped users optimize business marketing and development resources available through LinkedIn. But ultimately Alex found that his customers required something beyond a three-step mentoring program.
They craved community, long-term strategy and, most importantly, support implementing sales plans and measuring for results. After identifying this pain point, Alex partnered with an experienced software developer to design Jayla, a powerful platform that helps SMEs and corporates manage marketing and sales opportunities generated through LinkedIn.
This episode of DevReady explores how Alex Pirouz has transformed an entrepreneurial idea from an online service into an end-to-end solution.
Topics Covered:
● Optimizing LinkedIn: How linkfluencer morphed from a service to a scalable software.
● The importance of metrics.
● Why 99% of entrepreneurs “suck at execution”.
● How a non-tech founder approached the development/build-out of his Jayla application.

How to Market with CX with Neel Bhattacharya - Episode 62

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to Neel Bhattacharya, commercial software strategist and SaaS extraordinaire.
During the conversation, Neel describes what makes CX (or customer experience) unique from UX in the SaaS space, and why businesses should even care.
To understand how customers experience brands, businesses use a variety of tools to gather meaningful data. This data can then be used to help shape the whole range of customer experience, from tone in an email to the color of an app icon.
Customer experience plays a large part in customer retention, so businesses are keen to pay attention to the methods they can use to boost customer experience.
The customer survey is a popular metric for gauging customer experience. Questionnaires are infinitely customizable and simple to use for startups. These surveys also help to establish what are known as personas. Personas help an organization with the planning process. In the process, Neel says, they fix the marketing messages. In other words, businesses use personas to direct marketing campaigns, and if they are ineffective, they can use personas to figure out why.
Topics Covered:
● The differences between UX and CX.
● Understanding how customers experience our brands?
● Customer service vs customer experience.
● Key metrics to measure customer experience.
● The Net Promoter Score as a useful CX metric.
● Persona trees.

The Power of Voice in Digital Age with Ronsley Vaz - Episode 61

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to Ronsley Vaz, founder and Chief Energy Officer at Amplify. During the conversation, Ronsley describes many of the ways that podcasting has helped his business and improved his own quality of life.
In the way of business podcasting, Ronsley explains that understanding who your market is is critical, and it won’t help to send the right message to the wrong audience, so locking in your target is key to business success. This even extends to product launches, which we should use to learn instead of making a profit. “It hurts the ego to have a failed launch, but you can learn so much and not hurt the bank account,” Ronsley says, speaking to the power of embracing failure.
Ronsley als talks briefly about why he thinks podcasting is intrinsically beneficial. He says that the institutions of education didn’t teach us to raise our voices, so there is some trepidation that comes along with this. But at its core, podcasting is about the power of the human voice—a power that we are evolutionarily predisposed to—and how it can help lift the voices of the unheard and give volume to the silenced. In a way, podcasts help amplify.
Toward the end, Ronsley describes what Amplify actually does, which involves bringing the right podcasts to the right people to amplify them. He hopes everyone interested in podcasting could find out how to use it as a platform to share their stories and build in connection with one another, because there’s nothing more rewarding.
Topics Covered:
● The science of creativity.
● The value adds of podcasting.
● How people make use of podcasting within their businesses.
● Reusing content versus intentional volumes.
● Why the Agile methodology works.
● Finding the proper MVP for your business design.
● What we owe to the freedoms of our ancestors.