#256 - Jay Bartot, CEO Zeitworks - on creating SaaS businesses that stand the test of time

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help your business discover how work really gets done. My guest is Jay Bartot, Co-founder and CEO of Zeitworks.Jay Bartot is a serial technology entrepreneur and innovator with 20 years of experience building startups from the ground up. He's a creative risk-taker and passionate about developing and vetting ideas, providing vision and strategy, and building high-performing teams. Since June 2021, Jay is the CEO of Zeitworks. It's built around the idea that teams in every company execute thousands of repetitive processes every day but are challenged to understand how work really gets done because managers don’t have visibility into these complex workflows.This is what Zeitwork is solving: By building a fitness tracker for your people, processes, and productivity.Their belief: In the age of artificial intelligence, the value of human capital has never been more important.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jay to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses are leveraging automation. Jay explains that before you can automate something, you have to understand it. And that's exactly where most companies are going dark. He shares his big lessons learned to create defensible differentiation and what thread is constantly looking for to build a business that grows predictable traction from the start.Here's one of his quotes:Part of the differentiation is that this is a really hard problem. Every customer has idiosyncrasies in their processes and the applications they use to complete their processes. So that iterative process of getting new data from new customers, adjusting the technology, adjusting the product, it's something that can take years to do. Anyone else who is starting to work on this problem today has to go through this arduous R&D to figure out 'How do I take all this crazy data and turn it into something useful?'During this interview, you will learn four things:What to focus on to create a SaaS business that's got staying powerWhy the real value is not in automation, but in augmentation. Why 'Transparency' should be higher on your list of value driversWhat mindset to train if you want to accelerate your businessFor more information about the guest from this week:Jay BartotWebsite Zeitworks