In this episode of SaaS Fuel, host Jeff Mains sits down with Anthony Franco—serial entrepreneur, co-author of AI First Principles and the Wiser Method, and host of the How to Founder podcast—to talk about what it really takes to implement AI effectively in SaaS businesses. The conversation breaks past the usual hype, diving deep into the practical messiness of entrepreneurship, building tech that serves real humans (not just outputs), and how intentional iteration leads to successful outcomes.

Anthony Franco shares brutally honest stories of failure, the necessity of understanding end users, and the importance of starting with a noble cause before diving into AI adoption. If you’re a founder wanting actionable strategies to build a future-proof company in the age of AI, this is your episode.

00:00 "AI, Bias, and Holographic Futures"

03:44 "Future, Revenue Systems, and Strategy"

07:34 "Entrepreneurs Fuel Prosperity"

10:36 "Value Your Job, Avoid Mistakes"

15:02 "Earn the Right to Rebuild"

18:57 "User Experience Insights Revolution"

21:34 Necessary Complexity and Risk Management

25:49 "Leadership's Four Key Relationships"

28:23 "Wiser Method: AI Principles"

32:30 AI Missteps: Autonomy vs Collaboration

35:25 "Challenging Ideas and Biases"

38:03 "Readiness for Agentic Orchestration"

43:00 "Feature Flags & Brand Magic"

“Entrepreneurs are the pioneers of economic prosperity—the ones willing to look foolish bring prosperity to all.” —Anthony Franco

“If you automate broken things, you’re just scaling your problems.” —Anthony Franco

“Design for how the world is—not just how you wish it would be.” —Anthony Franco

“The reason you write software is to make someone’s life easier—not just your own.” —Anthony Franco

“Stop coding. Go talk to the person you’re coding for—not your manager, your end user.” —Anthony Franco

“If you win 10% of the time and fail 90%, you still win. Micro-failures fuel learning.” —Anthony Franco

Lead Arm-in-Arm, Not From Afar

Great leaders work alongside their teams, getting “calluses” from real work

Set Honest Expectations About Entrepreneurship

Don’t sell the dream—share failures and chaos as well as successes to guide founders realistically

Talk to End Users—Don’t Just Delegate Discovery

Leaders must become chief customer advocates; direct feedback is transformative

Don’t Automate for Automation’s Sake

Evaluate the root causes and bottlenecks before layering on tools

Embrace Necessary Complexity

Not all complexity is bad. Sometimes it’s a competitive advantage or required for regulatory compliance

Start Small—Iterate and Learn Before Scaling AI

Focus on incremental improvement, pilot adoption, and learning from failures

anthony@suitepea.com

aifirstprinciples.org

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyfranco/

x.com/anthonyfranco

The Captain's Keys

Small Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel’

Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/

Website -

In this mind-bending episode of SaaS Fuel, Jeff Mains chats with Darren Milne, co-founder and CEO of VividQ, about the future of holographic displays and how true 3D experiences will revolutionize everything from automotive HUDs to the way we watch TV, work, and interact with AI.

Darren Milne unpacks his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, describes the defining moment when he saw a real hologram for the first time, and outlines how his team is making science fiction a reality—including progress toward room-scale “holodecks.” Along the way, you’ll learn practical lessons about bridging science and commercialization, building successful licensing models, scaling with partnerships, and staying grounded while pursuing world-changing innovation.

00:00 "Holographic AI Revolution"

05:15 From Academia to Business Shift

14:08 "Holographic Display Business Strategy"

19:31 Automotive HUDs: Future-Ready Adaptability

24:48 "VR Nausea Explained by Science"

29:41 Building-Sized Holograms Revolution

32:57 "Creating Our Own Category"

42:25 "Software-Driven Hardware Control"

47:05 "Challenges of Licensing Innovation"

51:59 "Rethinking Growth and Investment"

56:05 "Epic Holographic Display Project"

01:02:20 "Insights, AI Growth, and Holodecks"

“Sometimes, in the pursuit of knowledge, you need a lot more money—and the way to get that is to create things people want to buy.” — Darren Milne

“The cars are all different, but with holography, the HUD doesn’t have to be. Software solves what used to take an assembly line.” — Darren Milne

“Every time I show a real hologram demo, people still ask if it’s fake. Once you see it, everything changes.” — Darren Milne

“You don’t need to build all the hardware to win big—sometimes licensing your tech brings more scale and staying power.” — Darren Milne

“If money were no object, I’d build the holodeck—an entire room of interactive holograms for training, gaming, everything.” — Darren Milne

“We thought building-sized holograms required new tech, but turns out we could do it with off-the-shelf laptop screens…and a lot of them.” — Darren Milne

Embrace Mindset Shifts

Moving from academia to entrepreneurship means valuing impact as much as knowledge. Sometimes, making ideas real requires leaving comfort zones.

Specialize, Then Delegate

You can’t be both the chief researcher and the chief executive for long. Recognize your strengths and trust your team to handle complementary roles.

Validate with Partners, Not Just Product

Early commercial traction can come from licensing and partnerships, especially when full-scale manufacturing or hardware isn’t feasible.

Solve for ROI, Not Just Coolness

Customers may love new tech, but recurring revenue comes from solving their biggest, most overlooked pain (e.g., HUD manufacturing savings).

Don’t Hire for Vanity, Hire for Necessity

Rapid hiring because “everyone else is scaling” can lead to layoffs and wasted resources if the technology isn’t ready for mass adoption.

Stay Resilient & Honest

Long sales cycles and the need to “build the category” require grit. When mistakes happen (such as premature scaling), own them, learn, and course correct.

https://www.vividq.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/darran-milne/

The Captain's Keys

Small Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code...

In this value-packed episode of SaaS Fuel, Mark Osborne, founder of Modern Revenue Strategies and top 25 marketing technology trailblazer, joins host VO and Jeff Mains for a tactical deep dive into building holistic, scalable revenue systems that go beyond the siloed tactics of old.

Mark reveals why random acts of marketing and sales are growth killers, the transformative impact of aligning marketing, sales, and customer success, and practical steps for identifying and nurturing your ideal customers. You’ll also learn how storytelling and “microscripts” can drive trust and reduce friction, the importance of bow-tie funnels (aka the power of retention and expansion), and get a playbook for creating try-before-you-buy offers that accelerate confidence. If you want your SaaS business to be built for significance and scale—this episode is your treasure map.

00:00 "Mastering Sales & Revenue Strategy"

05:11 "Building Effective Revenue Systems"

06:17 Revenue Growth Through Three Systems

12:35 Identifying Top Customers Strategically

13:39 Targeting the Right CRM Customers

19:31 "Aligning Teams to Drive Revenue"

23:49 B2B Buying Shift: Trust Erodes

25:34 Health, Perception, and AI Challenges

29:02 "Bite-Sized Client Value Strategy"

32:12 Effective SaaS Onboarding Strategies

35:49 Focus on One GTM Strategy

40:50 The Power of Specialization

42:35 "Storytelling Powers Human Connection"

47:28 "Creating a Category of One"

48:35 "Collaborative Metrics and Visual Mapping"

52:31 "3D Holograms & AI Innovation"

"But what I find is that really building a revenue system that has multiple components and sort of interlocking components is the real key to growth." — Mark Osborne

Category of One Marketing: "And so we have built a proprietary proven process that leverages our unique expertise for this unique marketplace. And if you believe that that's the right way to solve this problem, then we're the only solution that exists for you." — Mark Osborne

Quote: "the stat is now that something like 70% of the buyer's journey is done before they talk to a single provider, much less you, if you're the second or third tier provider in the marketplace." — Mark Osborne

Lower-Risk Sales Strategies: "it's just a way of giving them that bite of the burger so they can then be excited about coming in and finishing the meal rather than feeling like, well, should I talk to five more people or two more people or get three more references instead." — Mark Osborne

The Power of Storytelling in Sales: "Telling stories is the way that we really resonate and connect with people. So each of those different sort of layers of really small stories and really, you know, sort of large allegories are important throughout the sales process." — Mark Osborne

Build Systems, Not Silos

Sustainable growth comes when every part of the revenue journey is connected—attraction, acceleration, activation.

Customer Obsession Beats Logo Hunting

Long-term companies focus on advocating for and expanding existing customers, not just acquiring new ones.

Say No to the Wrong Revenue

The discipline to turn away poorly-matched clients fuels long-term success and product integrity.

Create Alignment Through Visual...

In this groundbreaking episode of SaaS Fuel, Jeff Mains sits down with Amos Bar Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Swann, the AI-native company on a quest to build the world’s first truly autonomous business. With only three human founders and a fleet of AI agents, Swann is redefining the startup playbook—targeting $10M ARR per employee and running leaner operations without sacrificing growth or burning out teams.

Amos Bar Joseph shares how Swann scales via intelligent automation and human-AI collaboration, creating systems where both people and agents operate in their zone of genius. Listeners learn actionable ways to build their “AI muscle,” leverage experimental GTM strategies, and develop organizations that amplify human talent rather than replace it.

00:00 "Building Resilient Customer-Focused Teams"

05:23 Reinventing the Startup Playbook

08:52 "Scaling Innovation Through AI Agents"

10:14 "Building an AI Support Agent"

15:00 "Optimizing Funnel With Human Leadership"

17:16 "AI-Powered GTM Automation Tool"

20:51 AI Amplifying Human Talent

26:56 Continuous Innovation Through Experiments

28:13 "Balancing Risk in Business Growth"

32:43 "Building AI Muscle Internally"

36:37 "AI Failures: Perfection Over Adaptation"

39:11 Defining Failure in Experiments

42:59 "Redefining Scale with Human-AI"

48:21 Automated Sales Lead Management

52:06 "Connect, Learn, Build Autonomously"

54:40 "Scaling Revenue & Holographic Tech"

"It wasn't like that. What happened is that we started iterating in human in the loop workflows where humans and agents work side by side and there's an iteration mechanism where we refine that collaboration until we got to a process that one person could scale to an output of what used to in the past." — Amos Bar Joseph

Quote: "It's kind of like a developer that works with sales and marketing and sometimes founders or rev ops to turn any go to market idea into an agentic workflow. So you can scale go to market with intelligence, not revenue, not headcount, and really iterate on your go to market at the speed of thought." — Amos Bar Joseph

Quote: "The moment that you remove all the technical complexity with a tool like Swann, then you can start iterating on your go to market at the speed of thought." — Amos Bar Joseph

Quote: "what we aim for is actually these unconventional playbooks, because these playbooks, these tactics, are the ones that you can drive the most disproportionate value from the resource that you invest in." — Amos Bar Joseph

Why Most AI Projects Fail: "The number one reason for that is that the user, the buyer, the organization is optimizing and the vendor together, they're optimizing for perfection, not for adaptation, as you just laid out, Jeff. And the reason is why that is the number one reason, is because you don't know what perfection looks like when you start." — Amos Bar Joseph

Leverage Talent, Not Headcount:

Focus on value creation per employee, using AI to scale intelligent output—not just adding more people.

Iterate to Innovate:

Use experimentation and iterative processes to refine human-agent collaboration and maximize business results.

Embrace the Zone of Genius:

Place team members in roles where their passions and skills create disproportionate value; let AI take on everything outside that zone.

Bias Toward Building

Adopt a build-first mentality with AI tools—solve your own business bottlenecks rather than just buying external solutions.

Stand Out With Unconventional Playbooks:

In...

This episode dives deep into the shifting landscape of SaaS growth, investment philosophy, and leadership with Klee Kleber, former Dell and Rackspace executive and co-founder at Build Group.

Klee Kleber shares why he prefers the "long game" model over traditional VC, explains the math behind durable businesses, talks about the importance of relentless execution, and how empathy, self-awareness, and diversity drive lasting success. From stories of luck at Dell to building customer love at Rackspace and the bold ambition of Topwater, this episode is packed with pragmatic wisdom for SaaS founders, operators, and investors.

00:00 Building for Impact and Permanence

03:12 "Strategic Investing and Growth Playbooks"

06:40 "Efficient Growth Through Discipline"

12:47 "Separate Division for Innovation"

15:14 Apple's Strategy: Innovation & Adaptability

19:21 "Scaling After Market Fit"

20:32 Obsessed Founders: Numbers & Customers

23:57 "Teamwork Drives Effective Leadership"

27:49 "Commit, Focus, Scale Success"

30:08 Exit Strategy Driven by Management

34:24 "Growth Limits and Opportunities"

39:31 "Customer Loyalty Drives Growth"

40:16 Target Audience Traits Matter

46:10 "Defining ICP: Human vs. MBA"

49:45 AI vs Doctor: Diagnosis Revolution

51:44 "Leadership, Innovation, Differentiation Challenges"

54:29 "AI-Driven Growth with Topwater"

"You can't diversify your way to success—you can only retain your wealth through diversification. To build a company, you have to go all in." — Klee Kleber

"Start with customer love—and radiate out from there. Obsess over the customers who love you, and the referrals will follow." — Klee Kleber

"Relentless execution is what differentiates great companies from those that just do okay or even good." — Jeff Mains

"Efficiency isn’t boring—it’s the secret to durable, compounding growth that actually lasts." — Klee Kleber

"Most business to me is treading water, being disciplined, not burning, testing ideas, measuring like crazy, until you find the live wire." — Klee Kleber

"Self-aware founders who build teams that compensate for their weaknesses are the ones who scale and thrive." — Klee Kleber

1. Build for the Long Game – Focus on investments and company-building strategies that aim for durability and lasting impact, not just quick wins.
2. Efficiency is a Competitive Advantage – Discipline in metrics like LTV/CAC and payback periods creates sustainable growth, instead of hoping for a lucky exit.
3. Relentless Execution Beats Strategy Alone – Luck may start the journey, but relentless, focused execution is what converts opportunity into success.
4. Balance Data with Customer Contact – Great founders marry spreadsheet discipline with real human customer feedback and empathy.
5. Embrace Diverse Perspectives – Teams with varied backgrounds, skills, and viewpoints consistently outperform homogenous ones and spark true breakthroughs.
6. Self-Awareness Multiplies Leadership Impact – Know your personal strengths and weaknesses; build teams that complement you and delegate accordingly.

klee@buildgroup.com

https://www.buildgroup.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kleekleber/

The Captain's Keys

Small Fish, Big Pond –

This week, Monica Marquez joins SaaS Fuel to dive deep into the real barriers behind successful AI adoption and organizational transformation. With a career spanning Google, Goldman Sachs, and the launch of Flip Work, Monica shares insights on bridging the gap between technology and human behavior, demystifying AI for non-technical teams, and championing change management that works for people—not just processes.

Discover the critical mindset shifts, the role of psychological safety, and why the future of work is about "survival of the fastest." Plus, get firsthand strategies for leaders to drive transformation and build trust with AI.

00:00 "Embracing Change for Success"

04:03 "Reinventing Work Mindset with AI"

07:33 "Adapting Success in AI Era"

11:08 "Leveraging AI to Enhance Work"

15:34 Building Trust in AI Use

19:05 Embrace Change to Avoid Extinction

21:37 "AI Accelerates Growth, Challenges Adaptability"

27:55 AI Skills: From Prompting to Mastery

30:24 Rapid Innovation and Iteration Challenges

35:38 Leveraging AI to Enhance Strengths

37:17 AI Empowers Founders to Execute

AI Adoption Struggles: "Millions, billions of dollars have been invested in the IT portion or the tools, but less than 2% of the companies are actually seeing ROI on that. And what they're really understanding is that it's because nobody's teaching the tool to the human." — Monica Marquez

Viral Topic: Rethinking Success in the Age of AI: "And so getting them to understand that you have to really unlearn and really destroy, disrupt that, that belief system and really start to create this equation that impact equals success." — Monica Marquez

AI vs Human Judgment: "Because what people don't realize is yes, AI is going to replace some of this monotonous administrative like, you know, work that most of us actually should be pretty happy to hand off. But, but the AI doesn't really know client relationships. The AI doesn't know how to read the room." — Monica Marquez

Building Trust with AI: "People don't trust the AI yet. And part of it is you can't build trust without evidence or without an exchange of, like, doing things." — Monica Marquez

"I feel like AI has helped us get further much faster with less people because AI is doing a lot of this that we would have potentially outsourced in the past." — Monica Marquez

Lead With Evidence, Not Assumptions

Encourage teams to collect data by experimenting with AI—overcoming fear and building trust through firsthand experience.

Prioritize Human Enablement

Invest in change management and behavioral shifts, not just technology rollouts.

Create Psychological Safety

Enable leaders and teams to "not know" and to admit uncertainty, fostering open experimentation and growth.

Champion Unlearning and Reinvention

Help employees break free from old success equations and conditioned beliefs.

Treat Digital Tools as Teammates

Coach AI (like an intern), iterating and refining outputs rather than expecting perfection on the first try.

Model Change at Every Level

Executives must embody the transformation—they are responsible for setting cultural signals for rapid adaptation.

monica@fts-ai.com

https://flipwork.ai

https://www.linkedin.com/in/themonicamarquez/

The Captain's...

In this episode of SaaS Fuel, Thanos Diacakis shares battle-tested advice for scaling SaaS teams, streamlining delivery, and maximizing developer happiness. Drawing on his experiences at startups and tech giants like Uber, Thanos reveals counterintuitive strategies for improving software output, optimizing technical debt, rethinking backlogs, and harnessing new mental models.

He breaks down the importance of incremental value, cross-functional collaboration, and avoiding the traps of over-planning. Whether you lead a small startup or an enterprise-scale engineering team, this conversation will challenge the way you think about speed, quality, backlog management, and long-term success.

00:00 "Checklists vs Software Complexity"

03:19 Bug Fixing: Intuition vs Strategy

08:24 Buckets: Features, Bugs, Investments, Risks

09:47 Optimizing Feature vs. Platform Focus

14:39 "Minimize Work in Progress"

19:20 "Bug Backlogs: Input vs Output"

20:39 Kanban Team Structure Guidelines

26:38 "Rapid Progress in Coding Tools"

28:21 "Minimal Planning, Bias for Action"

31:48 "Delivering Incremental Customer Value"

36:23 Collaborative Workflow Over Silos

39:35 "Building Products That Inspire Use"

42:53 "Accelerate: Building Effective Teams"

44:11 Team Workflow Optimization Framework

47:50 "Explore Mental Models Online"

Why Slowing Down Software Releases Might Backfire: One of the things that would happen is if you slow down, how you ship to production is you'll have bigger batches and bigger batches, which means you might ship more bugs all at once and have to find them in a bigger QA cycle. — Thanos Diacakis

"I also think we sometimes convince ourselves that we know more than we actually do and that we can plan a really long way out." — Thanos Diacakis

Viral Product Development Mindset: "If you engage engineers and product in these creative discussions, you might find out, oh, I scoped out these 10 things, but turns out the customer gets 80% of the value from this one thing." — Thanos Diacakis

Bureaucratic Bottlenecks in Big Companies: "They try to optimize locally for one particular function rather than optimize globally for shipping things out the door." — Thanos Diacakis

Viral Topic: "Why Every Team Should Read Accelerate": So I think if I give anyone advices, if you haven't read Accelerate, then go read that book. Because it's basically lays out in terms of, and this is in terms of like core technical and procedural sort of infrastructural things that teams ought to have to be productive. — Thanos Diacakis

Bias Towards Action Over Perfection

Avoid waiting for perfect plans, especially with innovative projects; instead, learn by doing and iterating.

Increase System Visibility

Make work in progress and team capabilities visible; this surfaces bottlenecks and areas for investment.

Balance Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

Strategic investment in tooling, tech debt, and risk mitigation ensures sustainable delivery and value realization.

Prioritize Collaboration Across Functions

Breaking down silos between product, engineering, and design dramatically accelerates delivery and reduces defects.

Ship Small, Ship Often

Frequent, incremental releases drive faster customer learning, boost agility, and reduce risk.

Cultivate a Shared Language for Outcomes

Use terms like investments and risk (not just features and bugs) to align business and technical priorities and drive meaningful...

In this action-packed SaaS Fuel episode, host Jeff Mains welcomes AI entrepreneur Alberto Rizzoli, co-founder and CEO of V7. They dive into the transformative power of AI in automating repetitive and complex knowledge work, discuss the accelerating pace of AI innovation, and unpack how both large enterprises and smaller teams can prioritize, implement, and benefit from next-generation “agentic” AI.

Alberto Rizzoli candidly shares insights on the future of SaaS, practical applications in B2B, go-to-market challenges, the evolving demands on leadership and hiring, and what it takes to stand out in a world where technology is no longer a lasting moat.

00:00 AI Revolution: Transforming Technology

04:00 AI Reducing Administrative Costs

06:21 "Measuring AI's Impact on Knowledge"

09:41 "AI as Workforce Revolution"

15:53 "Startups Compete on Quality"

18:27 "Tech Giants Dominate AI Future"

22:27 "AI Implementation Leadership Needed"

25:55 "Evaluating AI Tools Effectively"

29:31 AI Adoption Requires Trust

31:46 "Shift in GTM Strategies"

35:48 "AI Automation Careers in Demand"

37:20 "V7Labs: AI Workflow Automation"

Viral Topic: The Real Value of AI in Knowledge Work: "Even if you had the money to ask a lawyer and that were not an issue, you would still first ask ChatGPT because you get an instantaneous answer and there is no friction towards that." — Alberto Rizzoli

AI & the Future of Work: "Keeping a human away from their family and children for five hours to do some work that AI can do in five minutes by consuming a lot less relative energy will actually be kind of the best of both worlds." — Alberto Rizzoli

Quote: "There is still an enormous amount of unrealized value from AI. There is still close to no AI usage at the world's largest companies." — Alberto Rizzoli

AI's Impact on Infrastructure Investment: "We've never seen so much investment in power generation since World War II. So it really is a paradigm shift that's happening." — Alberto Rizzoli

Balancing Creativity and Responsibility: "the creative side is something that we enjoy, but there's so many things that are jobs that things that we have to do, things that always." — Jeff Mains

Viral Simplicity in User Interfaces: "instead of having to figure out, you know, how the watch was built, we're just asking what time it is." — Jeff Mains

The Cycle of Innovation and Investment: It almost becomes self fulfilling because there's so much money pouring into it. And that drives innovation, which brings more money, which drives more innovation. And I think it does become self fulfilling to some degree. — Jeff Mains

1. Prioritize Deep Automation: Leaders should focus AI efforts on well-documented, high-frequency processes, not just shiny new initiatives.
2. Embrace the Player-Coach Model: Middle management is evolving. Future leaders need to be hands-on contributors who coach, not just oversee.
3. Build for Scalability: The best AI tools get you 80% of the way—allocating resources to push to 100% is critical for lasting impact.
4. Hire for Tech Fluency: Hiring should emphasize technical problem-solvers across all departments, especially those who can identify and implement automation.
5. Champion Change Management: Assign a dedicated AI implementation owner to drive adoption—this role will multiply team productivity.
6. Invest in Quality, Not Hype: In a fast-copying landscape, the long-term winners are those who create the best user...