#323 - Emeric Ernoult, CEO of Agorapulse - on avoiding Million $ mistakes.

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to create a sticky and healthy B2B SaaS business. My guest is Emeric Ernoult, Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.Emeric is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in social media and SaaS. He co-founded affinitiz, one of the first modern social network SaaS platforms in France in the early 2000s.In 2010, he founded Agorapulse, a social media platform. He grew it from generating €150,000 in annual revenue to achieving the same figure every two days, without taking significant outside funding. This makes Agorapulse an inspiring bootstrapped SaaS success story. Hence, I invited Emeric to my podcast. We explore his insights on what it takes to create a successful B2B SaaS company without having to rely on external funding. He shares his big lessons learned running the business through a PLG motion and explains why they've pivoted to a sales-led SaaS motion, thereby moving up the market. Last but not least, he elaborates on his approach to customer segmentation, creating measurable business value, and how to enable constant evolutionHere's one of his quotes:"Do not raise money. VC firms and investors are going to tell you that you're going to get more than money... if you don't know how to leverage that money, you're basically just giving away part of your company for something that you're not going to get value from."During this interview, you will learn four things:Why you should prioritize investing in amazing customer support, especially when bootstrapping and the product is still evolvingHow to go about hiring people that have the highest chance to bring your company successWhat to focus on when you want to transition from PLG to a sales-led motionHis first principle when it comes to prioritizing features to create products people start talking about and keep talking about. For more information about the guest from this week:Emeric ErnoultWebsite: Agora Pulse