GUEST: SaaS Startup Advice You Wish You Had 💡 w/Steffen Schebesta, Brevo | Ep. 341

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness. We are back for the Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And I have an incredible guest today, an inspiring dude. And this is part of our new series called My Path. We bring people on the show that have just had an incredible career journey. And there's things that you can really learn from their journey. So who do we got? We got Stefan Chibesta. Now, Stephan was the CEO of Brevo North America. Now he's the chairman of their advisory board. And if you don't know Brevo, they're a roll-up of some of the biggest tools and platforms, especially in the email marketing space and from a global perspective.

0:49They're huge all around the world. And I've always been impressed by Brevo. But Stephan's story about how he started his business, the journey that got him there, failures he had to overcome. It's just awesome. And he's a good dude. So I just want to get into all of it. So Stefan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So what's wild about your journey, and that's what I want to dig into, is that you took this thing from literally nothing, right? And you ended up, you raised over$160 million. The business grew over 900 employees, all these crazy things happening. But it really, it started when you were a kid, right?

1:33And some people are going to listen to this and be like, oh, God, I am so lazy. I can't do what Stefan did. I'm never going to get there. But kind of give everybody kind of the origin story. How did this all come to be? And then is it possible for everybody to do what you did? Well, there's always a bit of luck involved and being at the right place at the right time. So for me, it started in high school when I started with like software development. I started programming when I was a teenager. And that was kind of driven by my dad who became a professor for computer science. So that was like I was, these are lucky circumstances for me.

2:16So he pushed me into programming a bit and I somehow fell in love with it. That was like the early days in the 90s, right? I'm 40 years old. So I started programming with like Turbo Pascal and Delphi and I started programming games and all kinds of like stupid stuff in the beginning. But that eventually transitioned to become my first software agency with a friend from high school. And, you know, if you run an agency for a while, you know, you're very dependent on a few customers, very service heavy. and sometimes it's very difficult to deal with customers, right? So eventually we wanted to build something more product-heavy, and this is how we transitioned into building an email marketing software back in Germany called Newsletter2Go, which I started in 2011.

3:12And then we almost bootstrapped it to about 80 employees and sold it to our French competitor in 2019. you. So let me ask a question about a SaaS business for a second. I'm just curious. What were, what are some of the things that you've learned? Like somebody's out there, they have a great idea for a new software business, somewhere software as a service business, SaaS business. And there, what are some simple kind of pitfalls? You're like, listen, if you're going to go down this road, what you really need to focus on are, you know, these three things, you know, these people, how many people are coming back and using it, whatever, or this is the thing you absolutely need to know if you're going to be in this world.

3:51What is that thing? Yeah, let me mention a few things. I think the fundamental, the starting point that I always point out to any founder, an early founder, is if you have an idea, if you have the will and the capacity to start a project, you should get into it. Just do it. Because there's always a reason not to do it. It's similar to having a child or switching jobs or doing anything relevant in your life. There's always a good reason not to do it. And sometimes you just have to take that step and have that leap of faith to get there. And the second one would be after you took that step, you'll figure it out along the way.

4:34So it won't be easy. starting a company is probably one of the maybe the most difficult thing I've done in my life there are so many pitfalls there's so many issues that basically problem solving all the time you're trying to figure out what's going on trying to to learn from what failed and and make the company successful but that's part of the journey and you'll be able to figure it out if you're persistent and if you really want to do it. And so there has to be some kind of mindset of learning, always improving, and hopefully having somebody you can talk to, maybe a co-founder or a mentor, that can be very, very helpful.

5:20But I think that's the basics are to have the right mindset, to get started, maybe without overthinking it. Because even I, if I had known the journey ahead of me, all the competitors, all the issues that we came across, I probably wouldn't have started the company, right? So sometimes it's good to be almost a bit naive when starting a project, and then you can figure it out. And one thing that is very important that we didn't really realize until we were a few years in is how important the business model is. And you talked about starting a software as a service company. The beauty of software as a service company is that there's a recurring mechanism within the business model.

6:06And the business model itself, I talked about an agency or a service-based business. It's not as recurring. Or if you have an offline business, it's hard to get user retention. Imagine you sell bridal fashion. Likelihood you will retain customers is pretty low. And you might grow through referrals, recommendations, but it's very, very difficult to grow business if you don't have recurring revenue from existing customers. So I really start thinking about a business model first. What's a business model where I know that customers will come back to me They can be retained. They will not churn. And then what's the growth mechanism inside that company?

7:03So to answer one of your questions, one very important metric, maybe my favorite metric, apart from revenue growth or the bottom line EBITDA, is the net revenue retention. that says so much about a company. It says so much about growth potential. It says so much about how good the product is as well. And it tells you a lot about the business model behind it. So, yeah, those are a few things that I really talked about. I love that. I love that because it really does keep people in North Star of what they should be thinking about if they're going to go down this road. And something you said at the beginning, I'm curious about where you said basically just get going, get started you know everyone tries to make all these you know plans business plans and this is going to happen they write a 50 page document are you saying if somebody's sitting out there right now listen like they got this idea they want to do this thing but they haven't laid out you know the next three years of exactly what's going to happen that you don't need this fancy business plan so to speak you don't need an mba to kind of just get things out there you're better off just going for it and figuring it out?

8:15Is that kind of the vibe? Yeah, totally. 100%. I think it's much more important to understand the customer, to build a product that adds value and that customers love. And the typical way my recommendation would be is to start in a small market, in a niche market, build a product that customers love over starting in a huge market and build a product that customers like. It's much easier to expand from the small niche into a bigger market when you have very loyal customers. And again, that kind of is this whole retention product market fit narrative. If you can do that, your customers will refer you, will recommend you, and you will grow kind of almost naturally product-led growth right i uh i'm so into that you know find something you could be the best in the world at niche down and then you can grow back up and i think that's so cool so let me pivot a total pivot here i have a question for you that i'm curious about so you really grew up learning how to code right you started a big sas company crushing it all that stuff ai is everywhere obviously now if if stefan was now today in this moment a 15 year old kid okay would stefan's dad still say hey get into this coding stuff you know that's the future or whatever or what what is your take on ai's impact on sas companies on coding on engineering on all of that?

9:56Yeah, it's quite interesting. I think it's here to stay for sure. It's a fundamental change. It's one of these things where maybe that happens every, what, 10, 20 years, the last time when the internet became really popular. And there's always opportunity and there's always threats to existing business models. The beauty about technology is that it evolves exponentially. So it's very, very hard to understand for a human mind. I think if you take like 100 exponential steps, you're at the moon, something like that. It's crazy, right? We don't understand it as a human being. So it's very hard to keep up with that.

10:39And so AI is evolving at that pace that we don't really understand. So how can we even take advantage of that? And that's a really good question to ask, Jay. And I don't have the one answer for you, except that every technological disruption will bring opportunity. And then it's up to us to find the opportunity and start something with it. And there's a lot of startups. I recently went to a conference and I had access to like 300 startup pitch decks. and 99 % of them said AI in the headline, right? Everybody does something with AI now. So obviously it's a big opportunity. Now it's up to you to figure out where the opportunity lies.

11:32And I can't answer that, but I would probably go into that space because it's clearly the future. Agentic web is a big thing in the marketing and sales CRM space. So that might be something that's interesting. I feel like the whole Gen AI wave is almost behind us already, but there's so many things that you can automate, that you can improve, make more efficient. One company that I coached at Antler, they used AI to automate all the documentation for software as a service company. So again, they broke it down, took one little niche where they knew they could apply AI to, they knew how to monetize it in that space.

12:17And it's a pain because I can tell you from our documentation, it's hundreds of pages. It's translated to seven languages. We have one change in the UI. We have to redo all the screenshots in seven languages. It's honestly, it's a pain. So I think like these kinds of approaches, there's a lot of money to be made in that next wave of AI. And again, if you don't know exactly what it is, maybe you have a first idea, try to validate it, talk to potential customers, get that product market fit figured out, maybe raise some money or try to do it yourself and then figure it out along the way. Right. Again, that kind of get into it, just do it mindset, I think is important because nobody can predict the future, but we can create the future.

13:06And I think that's what entrepreneurs do and how we can get into these topics. I think that really the theme coming out of this is to get started, whatever it is, and B, I love the idea of, you know, niching down and then growing from there and getting, you know, raving fans and loyal customers or whatever you're doing, because then you're on the right track. So speaking of raving fans, people are raving fans of Brevo, which you are the chairman of the advisory board for. We're going to put in the show notes a special discount code if anybody wants to check Brevo out. It's an incredible platform for marketing, for email, for all things.

13:42So we're going to put a special discount code in the show notes and we're going to put Stefan's LinkedIn in the show notes as well because his last name is almost as tough as my last name to spell and say. But Stefan, any other parting words or things as we're wrapping up here? I always encourage my friends, my relatives, sometimes to a degree that maybe it's too much, but I always encourage everyone around me to take that first step to become a founder. It's a beautiful experience. It's tough for sure, but it's really a way to find fulfillment and to work on something that you're passionate about with people that you like.

14:24so I would really like to encourage people to take that first step and become a founder and start a new business I love it, very inspiring stuff really appreciate you being here and we're going to put it all in the show notes so Stefan we will talk to you soon my man you did it, you made it to the end nice, but the party's not over, subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me.

15:12Guruevents.com. Check it out.