[SaaS Club] A SaaS Founder's Journey from Refugee to Series A Startup

Hey Reader

I hope you're doing well.

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

🎧 Podcast

A SaaS Founder's Journey from Refugee to Series A Startup

In 2018, Nik was working as a Program Manager at LinkedIn when he came up with the idea for a new startup.

In January 2019, he was ready to quit his job. But the hardest thing for him was telling his parents.

As refugees from the Bosnia civil war, his parents thought their son had finally 'made it' by getting a job with a great company.

And now he was about to tell them that he was quitting.

After that he and his co-founder Zak got to work. And it didn't take them long to figure out how to build the product.

The bigger problem was that neither of them knew anything about sales and how to get customers.

In this episode, Nik shares his lessons as a first-time founder:

• What Nik did to learn how to sell and get the first 15 or 20 customers.

• How he went from having no sales experience to selling the product to building a sales team.

• A technique Nik uses to deal with the emotional highs and lows of being a startup founder.

• How he's used a somewhat unusual framework to build a solid support structure around him.

Today, their customers include B2B tech companies such as Asana, Glassdoor, Greenhouse, and Salesloft. The co-founders have raised $23M, including a $20M Series A round in 2021.

I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to the full podcast episode

📈 LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Struggling to close deals? The B2B sales landscape is changing. How sellers sell is out of sync with how today’s buyers want to buy.

Cold outreach is hard enough but if you’re using bad data, then you’re wasting time at every stage of the sales process.

Did you know you can overcome these challenges with deep sales technology which translates comprehensive, high-quality data into real-time insights? 

These insights empower sales reps and teams to achieve better outcomes, including more pipeline, higher win rates, and larger deals.

LinkedIn has built the first deep sales platform with the next generation of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Try Sales Navigator and get a 60-day Free Trial

Unleash your seller superpower today.

📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is from Nik:

Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches by Carlo Ancelotti

"He's is a famous soccer coach. But he's more of an introvert, not the yeller type of coach. And it was fascinating how you don't have to be this charismatic, very outspoken person to be a great leader. I really enjoyed the book. I'm a big soccer fan as well, so, it was nice to blend business leadership and soccer all in one."

🌐 Around the Web

YouTube

We're now posting full-length video interviews on YouTube.

So if you want to watch the interview with Nik, check it out here:

😍 Let's Get Social
Want to get more social? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Have a great week!

- Omer


P.S. I've just launched a new coaching program (Accelerate 2.0). If you're interested in joining the first cohort you can learn more here.