S7E3 – Building SaaS Partnerships That Actually Drive Revenue with Hugo Pereira

Are you wondering on ways of Building SaaS Partnerships That Actually Drive Revenue? Scaling a SaaS startup isn’t just about product-market fit or revenue numbers, it’s about people, culture, and leadership. In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran Hofman sits down with Hugo Pereira, the Co-founder of Ritmoo and author of Teams in Hell: How to End Bad Management, to discuss ways of building SaaS partnerships that actually drive revenue.

If you’ve ever wondered why some startups skyrocket to $100 million ARR while others stall at $1 million, the difference often lies in what happens behind the scenes. Hugo has helped scale multiple companies and has seen it all the pitfalls, the patterns, and the principles that actually work. In this episode, brought to you by SaaStock, Hugo shares hard-earned insights for founders who want to scale with clarity, not chaos.

As a valued listener of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, we’ve got something special for you! As a valued participant, you have the exclusive opportunity to get a 30% discount on tickets to SaaStock Europe this October – the leading conference for AI & SaaS founders, investors, and leaders.

The Foundation of Culture Begins with the Founding Team

According to Hugo, company culture isn’t a document—it’s the lived behaviors of the founding team from day one. The choices founders make early on—how they communicate, solve problems, and treat others—create a ripple effect that defines the company long-term. While it’s not essential to write a culture manifesto on day zero, founders must be intentional about the kind of environment they’re building.

Common Reasons for Failure in Scaling

As a company transitions from startup to scaleup, certain patterns of failure emerge:

• Processes Break Down: What worked with 5 people often collapses at 25. Informal communication becomes inefficient, and roles blur without structure.
  
• Founders’ Over-Control: Founders who refuse to delegate become bottlenecks. Growth demands trust and shared ownership.
  
• Lack of Alignment: Growth can mask confusion. Without clarity around the ideal customer profile and strategic focus, companies lose momentum.
  

The Importance of Clarity and Customer Connection

Sustainable scaling requires a shared sense of purpose and constant market alignment. Hugo stresses the need for a compelling “why now” story—something every team member understands and rallies behind. Just as critical: maintaining regular, meaningful engagement with customers to inform product direction and validate assumptions.

Stages of Growth in Scaleups

Hugo outlines three distinct phases in a SaaS company’s growth journey:

• Hustle Stage: Early wins come from sheer grit and founder drive.
  
• Frameworks and Processes: As complexity increases, structure becomes necessary to avoid burnout and confusion.
  
• Repeatable Systems: Maturity comes when the company can replicate wins at scale with consistency and efficiency.
  

Warning Signs of Cultural Misalignment

In today’s remote and hybrid environments, broken culture can hide in plain sight. Hugo highlights red flags:

• Overemphasis on consensus and avoidance of conflict
  
• Lack of honest feedback loops
  
• Burnout disguised as “commitment”
  
• Teams growing apart from their customers
  

These signals suggest deeper issues that require urgent leadership attention.

Scaling Trust and Accountability

To scale successfully, teams need more than just vision—they need trust. Hugo recommends formalizing what’s usually informal: regular check-ins, shared commitments, and open dialogue. When team members feel safe to speak up and take ownership, trust grows—and so does performance.

Avoiding Leadership Pitfalls

Leadership mistakes scale just as quickly as wins. Hugo warns against three major traps:

• Micromanagement
  
• Indecisiveness
  
• Blame culture
  

Instead, leaders must prioritize transparency, timely decision-making, and a culture where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities—not failures.

The Path to 10K MRR and Beyond

When building toward 10K in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Hugo emphasizes prioritizing depth over speed. Startups should focus less on closing deals and more on opening meaningful conversations with customers. As revenue climbs toward the $10M ARR mark, the strategy shifts—community building, partnerships, and scalable growth motions become essential.

Conclusion: Staying True to the Mission

At every stage of growth, one principle holds: don’t forget why you started. Hugo reminds founders to stay anchored to their original mission. When the purpose is clear and consistent, it fuels retention, drives alignment, and helps navigate inevitable growing pains.

Final Thoughts

Scaling a SaaS company is a complex journey, but with the right mindset, structure, and leadership approach, it’s absolutely achievable. Hugo Pereira’s experience offers a practical playbook for founders: be intentional about culture, obsess over clarity, and never lose sight of your “why.” With these foundations in place, growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of team health or customer connection—it can amplify both.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction: Building Structure in Startups and the Importance of Customer Feedback
• (1:00) – Episode Overview: What SaaS Companies Fail to Do in Culture and Team Dynamics
• (1:10) – Guest Introduction: Hugo Pereira, Co-founder of Rytmo and Author of “Teams in Hell”
• (1:35) – Scaling Experience: Helping Companies Grow from $1 Million to $100 Million in Revenue
• (2:05) – Story of Startup Failure: Culture and Team Challenges in a B2B SaaS Company
• (3:14) – Founding Team Impact: Old-School Mindsets and Lack of Customer Validation
• (4:23) – Realities of Startup Culture: Authority-Driven Environments and Their Effects
• (5:40) – Importance of Early Culture: Building Trust vs. Toxicity from Day Zero
• (6:39) – Defining Culture: Values, Behaviors, Rituals, and Systems in an Organization
• (8:03) – Common Failures in Scaling: Process Breakdowns, Founder Control, Lack of Alignment
• (9:24) – Complexity of Scaling: Need for Structure and Clear Ownership in Growing Teams
• (11:27) – Misconceptions of Growth: Confusing Traction with Understanding and Clarity
• (12:06) – The Evolution of Startups: From Hustle to Frameworks and Repeatable Systems
• (13:38) – Importance of Alignment: The Why Now Story and Trust Building in Teams
• (14:56) – Customer Ties: The Role of Deep Customer Relationships in Scaling Success
• (17:57) – Feedback and Misalignment: Warning Signs of Cultural and Team Misalignment
• (19:20) – Remote Work Challenges: Maintaining Alignment and Feedback in Hybrid Setups
• (21:23) – Hero Culture Warning: Overworking and Glorifying Output without Results
• (22:00) – Scaling Trust and Accountability: Shared Expectations and Frequent Feedback
• (25:03) – Feedback Loops: Formal and Informal Check-Ins to Foster Open Communication
• (28:59) – Leadership Pitfalls: Behaviors That Can Kill Morale and Momentum
• (32:17) – Best Advice for SaaS Founders: Never Lose Sight of Your Initial Why
• (33:38) – Future of SaaS: Preparing for Slower Deal Cycles and Community Engagement
• (35:27) – Advice for Early-Stage SaaS: Prioritize Conversations Over Conversions
• (36:55) – Scaling to 10 Million ARR: Focus on Repeatable Motions and Community Building
• (41:15) – Where to Find Hugo’s Book: “Teams in Hell” Available on Amazon

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Hugo Pereira

The CEO might be everywhere. But at 80 or 100 people, the same CEO cannot be at every meeting, every decision, or it becomes a bottom deck. That’s where you need to start thinking about, Oh, I actually need structure. I need clear ownership. And that’s where startups and founding teams tend to start failing because they have to start. They can be on the details, but they cannot be everywhere. If you don’t commit to this is actually our customer profile, our ICPS, people like to say, then sooner or later, churn is going to start going up, cost of acquisition is going to climb, the sales team is going to be chasing their own customers just because no one stopped to ask, Okay, wait, wait, wait. We have one million ARR. Who are we really here for if you want to hit 10 million? And that’s the next confusion I see, which is people don’t stop for clarity. They just keep going because they assume growth is clarity. If you stop hearing from customers, from people, in a matter of weeks, something is off. If you stop having customer success mentioning customer issues or sales mentioning customers they’re talking to, if you stop listening about customers somehow in the conversations, a little bit of a warning sign there.

[00:00:58.380] – Hugo Pereira

It means something is being written.

[00:01:00.000] – Joran

Today, we will be discussing what SaaS companies fail to do in culture and team dynamics as they start scaling.

[00:01:10.520] – Joran

My guest today is Hugo Pereira. Hugo is the co founder of Rytmo, a goal software built for fast moving teams that want strategic clarity without the blood of OKRs. A fractional growth operator helping scale up with go-to-market and build resilient high-performing teams. He’s an angel investor in early-stage companies, and he’s also the author of the book called Teams in Hell How to End Bad Management. Welcome to this show, Hugo.

[00:01:33.560] – Hugo Pereira

Thanks, Jorin. Thanks for having me. I actually forgot.

[00:01:35.600] – Joran

Before this, you helped companies scale from $1 million to $100 million in revenue, a team from 10 to 700 people. Just to make sure you did this multiple times.

[00:01:45.660] – Hugo Pereira

Yeah, I never get told. It’s always a fun joy, and the fun rights to do it over and over again.

[00:01:51.140] – Joran

Nice. Let’s start with fun or maybe not so fun. Can you share a story of a startup or scale up you work with that seemed to be on track to succeed, but ultimately failed, and tell us a bit what went wrong, and especially, of course, on the culture and team side.

[00:02:06.230] – Hugo Pereira

My first startup, which now seems a lifetime ago because it was already 2012, which he thought like yesterday, but it’s already more than 10 years ago, more than almost 15. But it was a B2B SaaS company out of Belgium. Belgium founded. It was a decision-making software, so they were building decision-making tools for complex stakeholder environments. Just think about environmental companies that need to make decisions on which project to prioritize. We had everything on paper, good potential products, seed funding, big name customers like the government of Canada, Brussels Airport, the big train company in Italy, Taufe. Solid start. Everything seemed good on paper. I joined a startup rather than a corporate at the time because there were not many hot startups in Europe. I thought all the startups were cool. For sure, any startup will have a better culture than any enterprise company. That startup had a culture deeply flawed despite being a small team of six, seven people. It was the first time I realized that in small companies, startups are all about the founding team. The founding team sets the behavior, mindset, choices, the values up to maybe even 50, 100 employees is all about the founding team and their behaviors.

[00:03:14.220] – Hugo Pereira

In this situation, the founding team operated from a very old-school, top-down, common and control mindset. I remember that one time we had an all-nighter with the marketing team putting out a new website live. At 3: 00 AM, we were super happy. Plenty of mistakes launching at 3: 00 AM. Definitely do not do that. The next morning, I arrived five minutes late to the office and immediately got pulled apart, got sculled, it’s unacceptable, it cannot arrive late to the office, et cetera. I was like, It’s five minutes, and I was at them till 3: 00 AM. Over time, I realized that the founding team was very ego-driven, a lot of authority. Even on product roadmap, it was dictated almost entirely by their university thesis logic. They had just come out of university, they had built a thesis, and that was the whole concept behind the software. No customer validation, no feedback loop, a lot of stubbornness. For me was a good example of, well, a bad example, but a good example at the early stage of my career on everything that you should not do at a startup level in order to scale. It doesn’t come as a surprise that I cannot say that they fail in a binary sense because they still exist, but they definitely fail drastically short from their potential.

[00:04:23.060] – Hugo Pereira

They are probably a small, medium company still. That’s one of the cliché stories that many people face at startups.

[00:04:29.100] – Joran

I love it. I I had a similar experience when I started working. I did my internships abroad and I came to the Netherlands. I started working this corporate job. I mean, it wasn’t a startup, it wasn’t sexy at all, but I experienced authority and things I didn’t want. After that, I joined the startup world and never left.

[00:04:45.140] – Hugo Pereira

I remember we went to Turkey for a web summit alike, like these large tech conferences. It was not a web summit, it was one of the other big ones. Where there was a startup pitch competition. It were on the final 10. The CEO and co founder went on stage, did a pitch. We didn’t win. And afterwards, on the way back, it was like, Well, we didn’t win because the speech preparation, the messaging, the positioning, what you said was not good. So that’s why we lost because you didn’t do a good work. It’s a startup competition, hundreds of companies, many factors. But yet it was a very command and control, very blame culture. At a very early stage, it was just a seven-people company. If that’s the motion that’s set by the cofounding team, then it trickles down to whatever behavior happens next. That’s why I only stayed one year at the company, maybe a year too long. But it taught me a lot It is a startup culture. This matters. It’s going to make a difference between make it or break it. Naturally, it’s all about the product and service, but over time, culture can play a role or behavior can be big success as well.

[00:05:40.830] – Joran

Makes sense. It goes well into my next question because I wanted to ask, when should you be caring about team and culture, but you already said it starts with the founding team. I guess it starts day one, probably.

[00:05:51.280] – Hugo Pereira

Day zero, especially if you are a founder or a first-time leader. Culture is like a seed that grows into either building an organization that is built on trust or toxicity. It’s a bit of a tough word, being a toxic environment or a trust environment. If you ignore it early, I think you’ll pay for it later. Now, it does not mean that you need to have a culture code and a whole documentation on day one because it’s very hustle-oriented. But it means that whatever behavior you set as your aspirations, all is the behavior that the company or the startup will have for years to come. So at least you need some consciousness about the culture you want to build. If a founder gets there or not, that’s a different question.

[00:06:29.000] – Joran

When we talk What culture? What does team and culture actually mean to you? Could you describe how you would- There’s always this joke culture is the behaviors happen when you are not in the room.

[00:06:39.810] – Hugo Pereira

The choice that people make when you’re not in the room is the hidden behaviors. But mostly culture I see as a combination of values, behaviors, and rituals or systems. The behaviors can be as simple as what you prioritize speed or alignment based on the founding culture. Do you prioritize customer feedback or sales input? There’s a lot of behaviors that you take. It’s based on the choices of culture. Values are a bit more intrinsic, but an important aspect, and I think people do take it very lightly nowadays. I’m not talking about values like a one-sentence values, but I talk more about values about do the company has the same share understanding of transparency? Are you buffer-alike? Buffer, the social media tool that has everything published, salaries, roadmap, revenue. Or I talk transparency more like an IBM or an enterprise company that is filter transparency, let’s say, because of in the context of business. I think have a shared understanding of the values is a clear one. The other one is rituals. Rituals could be as simple as the choices you make on off-sites. Do you do quarterly off-sites? Do you do hybrid work? If you do remote work, do you do asynchronous?

[00:07:43.460] – Hugo Pereira

Do you choose asynchronous? But if you choose asynchronous, do you reward discipline? Because if you do asynchronous but you don’t have any documentation, you’re going to have trouble sooner or later. Do you reward the discipline and behavior processes, not just the outcome? That’s what I meant by culture, a mix of values. If your system rituals that define how an organizational works.

[00:08:03.960] – Joran

Today, we’re going to talk about what SaaS companies do which fail in culture. In the numbers, we’re going to talk about the positive as well. Let’s start with the negatives, I guess. In your view, what are the most common Are there any reasons why scaleups fail during growth, and I guess, specifically towards team and culture?

[00:08:20.730] – Hugo Pereira

I’ve been to three, four startups as an operator employee or as a founder or as a first time hire. Then as a fractional, I think I work with six scaleups. I work mostly with scaleups or 10 million ARR companies as a minimum. There are three reasons I see most of the time scaleups failing. To sustain the growth, because they might grow, but they might not be lasting in growth. People’s systems don’t evolve with complexity. Let’s say companies are growing and what used to work breaks. For example, you start with informal check-ins because you are a small team. Why do you need more than informal check-ins? But it becomes chaos when you stop having clarity. Or feedback becomes hearsay. I heard this, I heard this, I heard this, versus actually structured feedback that is documented. Or the rose blur. You have someone that was hired, but they do a mix of everything. But when the company becomes bigger, you cannot keep having people that do just a lot of everything. A good example is a 20-person startup. You have everyone reporting directly to the CEO. You don’t, but somehow the CEO might be everywhere. But at 80 or 100 people, the same CEO cannot be at every meeting, every decision, or it becomes a bottleneck.

[00:09:24.120] – Hugo Pereira

That’s where you need to start thinking about, Oh, I actually need structure. I need clear ownership. That’s where startups and founding things tend start failing because they have to start. They can be on the details, but they cannot be everywhere. There is all this conversation about founder mode. A lot of people confused founder mode as being excited, mission critical on the details versus founder mode has to be on everything. I I thought that the founder mode is discussing the text of a NAV when you are a 300 people company. It’s a waste of time. Which comes to my second point, which is founders that control too long. Tends to be the second time when I think people tend to fail. The company grows, the leadership style stays the same. The founder wants to have the final say on the design and product, every pixel, every line of copy, every sprint. I remember even my CEO at TV Box even had to learn that growth. We wanted to discuss everything on marketing because you’re so excited. I remember telling Christoff, did you hire me to make decisions or did you just follow what you say? Are you the marketing person or am I the marketing person?

[00:10:20.660] – Hugo Pereira

You’re right, I’m sorry. He said, Okay, what do you want to have an owner? What do you want to really have a conversation about? What do you care about? This. Then we’re going to discuss this. Everything else, unless it’s a red flag, let it go. That was it. He was able to grow with it. He said, Okay, you’re right, I have to let it go. Everyone loves growth at startups, but most fail because of lack of alignment. They confuse traction. They think traction means understanding. Oh, we are growing, therefore everyone knows what’s happening. But success can mask confusion. Growth can spike without having any clarity. You can keep on growing just because of momentum without having clarity on what you actually are building. For example, you can get one million ARR with a bunch of use cases. You We have five, six different use cases. But if you don’t commit to this is actually our customer profile, our ICPS, people like to say, then sooner or later, churn is going to start going up, cost of acquisition is going to climb, sales team is going to be chasing their own customers just because no one stopped to ask Okay, wait, wait, wait.

[00:11:16.020] – Hugo Pereira

We are at 1. 0 in the RR. Who are we really here for if you want to hit 10 million? That’s the next confusion I see, which is people don’t stop for clarity. They just keep going because they assume growth is clarity.

[00:11:27.060] – Joran

Yeah, interesting. I guess the first one, processes break, so feedback becomes hearsay, rules become blurry, founder. I guess second one, always wanted to fight or say, third one, lack of alignment, not agreeing on the ICP, the case studies you want to go after.

[00:11:40.400] – Hugo Pereira

It’s cliché for a lot of people. They just see, This is what’s happening nowadays at my start. But it’s the most common things I see over and over again. Even at companies with 10, 20, 30 million, sometimes they are exactly having this mistake and it’s just in front of them. But they are just so deep in today to day business. They just sometimes someone to say, Look at this. Can you agree on the shared circumstances? And if they agree, then the chances of succeed are much higher.

[00:12:06.540] – Joran

It’s a bit of a startup style where you have to have a little bit of chaos, but then at one point, you need to create the clarity. Success can mask confusion. So I guess if you have a lot of success, you probably don’t want to deal with it anyway because things are going great. But at one point, you need to start building the clarity.

[00:12:22.800] – Hugo Pereira

Yeah, you can see in all sorts of sectors, even the electric vehicle market, everyone was growing. Even the We saw software for electric vehicle charging. All of them were growing. The market was growing. As soon as the market hit a plateau or sales decrease or problems arise, everyone starts shaking. Then it’s where the confusion starts happening because it was like, Oh, now we have 12 use cases and 18 personas, and we have to make a choice. Making a choice means cautiously lose revenue somewhere. That’s when you can distinguish founders that are really sharp versus founders that are just indecisive. It’s just like, Okay, I cannot lose any single revenue because my VC is going to kill me. But you might need to make tough choices in order to grow faster or better. Just a small example of masking confusion.

[00:13:10.620] – Joran

I think you already answered my next question because I wanted to ask what separates companies that succeed at scaling from those that don’t. But it’s creating clarity and making sure that everybody goes the same route.

[00:13:21.580] – Hugo Pereira

Clarity of the problem to solve. Nowadays, I think it’s even more important to own the why now story. There’s so much noise because of a variety of reasons on B2B SaaS. There’s so much tooling, there’s so much possibilities with software that if you don’t own why this matters, why now and the US story, across the company, it’s going to become really tough to scale. I’m only saying something really simple, but that alignment is really tough to get. I think it’s what separates the ones that succeed from the ones that don’t. Other things are also important from a people point of view, which is the ones that have clear accountability and ownership in their whole motion of people. That’s really good. The last one is a cliché one, which is deep. I think every company has to have deep customer ties. People talk about customer obsessed, customer first, all this jargon. But overall, I know it’s silly, but yeah, if product is talking to users, if marketing is listening to the community, sales reports back to learning, this whole organization works as a learning system, then the chances of succeeding are much higher. I know it’s easier said than done, but it is a behavior.

[00:14:23.040] – Hugo Pereira

Just to explain, for example, the first thing as a fractional operator, I tend to do at any team I join is to take over the customer stories interviews. I just say, Hey, for the next period of time, I know that you might be responsible for this, but I want to be the next one interviewing the customer, the success story myself. Because then I talk to the customer, I interview, I try to understand, I go to another one. It’s the only way for me to really learn why people choose the customer that I represent, that I work with. So deep customer ties for me really helps succeed at scaling, I think.

[00:14:56.020] – Joran

Nice. Any scale-up ride goes to different stages. I went through a bit the process, as you mentioned, with a company called D334, where I joined where there were 18 people. I left when there were 120. So we had the process break all the time, where I wrote the process, then six months later, I had to throw it away again. What are the typical What are the different stages, scaleups, I guess, go through when you think about company culture? Because we had the founder mindset and their behaviors. But then, of course, people come in, still small team. Then at one point, I guess, things are going to change. What are the different they go true?

[00:15:31.530] – Hugo Pereira

It’s a good question. At first, growth is driven by hustle. It’s a bit cliché because even people are not talking about, Oh, the hustle culture is driven by culture. But the reality is, even if I believe that you shouldn’t be working 24/7 for 10 years in a row, but the reality is that for startups to succeed in a growth stage at the beginning is hustle point. Then hustle is no longer enough because then when you start hiring more people, the responsibility starts to get dropped between functions. Martin says, Oh, no, this is sales responsibility. Sales is not this. It’s yes, it’s a responsibility. You have this loop of like, No, you are responsible for leads. I’m responsible for the next part. Then you have a product launch where there’s no enablement or marketing campaigns that have messaging that sales doesn’t agree with. This is where the founders meet the inflection point, where you go from hustle to form of frameworks. The second stage is like a framework or you process, I don’t know how to say a crossword, but we process shit out of things. I know it’s a bit tough, but it just formalize frameworks.

[00:16:31.160] – Hugo Pereira

This is how we work, this is how we scale, this is how we build, and this is the second stage. The third stage, perhaps, is the stage where you start to have peer growth, no longer depending on founders, but on peer groups, leadership teams, the specific partners, specific customers that help you scale everything. That’s where shared metrics, shared ownership, lightweight processes play a role. You have hustle, then you have first motion of lightweight processes and frameworks at the second stage, and then the third stage is repeatable systems. You just start repeating things because it’s a motion. This is where you join in and there is an onboarding process. There’s an excellent onboarding where people follow content and they have a system where, Oh, I can order a laptop. There’s an actual emotion that just follows, just works. Then you can repeat that. If it’s 100, 200, 400, and 600, 1,000 people, it doesn’t make a difference. It’s the same process. It just scales with it. Those ones tend to be at least three growth stages. They don’t have names. I don’t have a name for it. Maybe it’s a good idea for a content This is what I see happening most of the times.

[00:17:32.780] – Hugo Pereira

I’m thinking about, like Simer, to your podcast, up until 10 million RR, these are three stages. The first one until the 10K is all informal, then to 1 million, you start having the lightweight processes. Then from 1 to 10, Honestly, it’s about finding repeatable motions. I think repeatable motions even in culture. That’s where you care about the onboarding, that’s where you care about customer feedback loops, that you care about speed of development, et cetera.

[00:17:57.680] – SaaStock

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[00:18:57.460] – Joran

When we look at cultural alignment or misalignment, because nowadays a lot of companies work remote or hybrid. It’s harder to figure out, I guess, are things working with somebody? Because you can lost things because you’re either in Slack or you can just close your laptop after Zoom meeting and you have no idea what’s happening. What warning signs should leaders look out for when it comes to cultural misalignment or team misalignment?

[00:19:20.740] – Hugo Pereira

A few come to mind. The first is consensus seeking. When you have excessive consensus, I know people think about, Oh, why is that bad? It’s a learning sign. That means that people are not challenging back, they’re not pushing back. That means if they’re not pushing back, it’s because they’re not at a stage where they trust or they feel they can voice their opinion. You want to have productive conflict. You want to have people push back. You want that. The other one is the lack of feedback channel, especially in an early stage. If a co founder CEO is not easy access to anyone that joins a company, then you’re losing a feedback channel. I recall something great, even from TV Box, even for another company that I worked with, which was an AI software quality monitoring tool, where the CEO was meeting every single new person that joined the company and taking them for breakfast or lunch. It was really nice. Also, he up until 250 people. I recall that at least at TV Box, the CEO did that. I found, wow, he really is making the time to go. After, when he became too big, kept doing breakfast with four or five people of the company, like a leator, the chief of staff will just pick and then you’ll go on for breakfast or lunch with them.

[00:20:22.830] – Hugo Pereira

I found that was a fascinating feedback channel for understanding there is misalignment. It did create chaos, as you said, because sometimes there will be feedback. The feedback will be processed by the CEO, five people represent 500. No, this is all wrong. Let’s change it. It creates chaos. But it was also fun acting on it. The feedback channel is critical. I say feedback channel on people because it’s a topic that could be the same for customers or even partners. The other one I think is very dangerous is the hero culture. That’s when you start promoting and glorifying overwork. That’s very typical even from Southern cultures, which is like, Oh, man, John is working 16 hours a day. He’s always on fire, etc. Maybe John is overwork. Maybe John is just doing It’s busy work, he’s just output-driven. I don’t know, I had an example of a fractional operator, a customer that I had where the content marketier was over-glorified. She creates three blog articles a week. All is on, all is on content for everyone that sells. Then I check the one-year growth of SEO ranking and traffic to the website, et cetera, and was exactly the same.

[00:21:23.080] – Hugo Pereira

Nothing moved. You are overworking, doing output, output, output, output. Everyone is glorifying and becoming the hero coach. This is the shining star of the company, at least from marketing point of view, and the result is not there. Overwork being glorified is a warning sign. The last one is more business, less culture, but I still find it’s part of culture, which is customer detachment. If you stop hearing from customers, from people, in a matter of weeks, something is off. If you stop having customer success mentioning customer issues or sales mentioning customers they are talking to, if you stop listening about customers somehow in the conversations, a little bit of a warning sign there. It means something is being hidden. It’s a misalignment.

[00:22:00.800] – Joran

Makes sense. One step deeper into this, we talk about trust and accountability. You mentioned it already, you need to have high ownership in the company if you really want, I guess, the startup to succeed, and you also want people to push back on things. But how do you even scale maybe even trust and accountability?

[00:22:19.040] – Hugo Pereira

It’s a great question. I don’t even know how you can scale trust. There’s a few things that when I was thinking or when you were asking me that question before, I was just thinking about how can you scale trust? But there was one thing that came to mind. I remember this story from Univox, which is when you switch from being the manager to a manager of managers, when the team gets too big, you have to rely on three, four, five, six, seven people to continue the culture. That’s where you can scale trust, which is like, Okay, I no longer can influence how you manage your sub team or your smaller pot, but I trust that you’re going to keep the same philosophy of trust as I have or as the one that I want to evoke. That’s when you can scale trust, when they represent the same behavior that is positive for the company and they are not afraid of doing so. I think that’s one, and that’s very conscious decision to say, Okay, I trust you to build a trust within your sub team. You have to be free to do it in your own way with your own style.

[00:23:15.260] – Hugo Pereira

But then you have to agree on behaviors. I think that’s just one, to have shared expectations. So clear expectations on the behavior is one, frequent feedback. On accountability, I think accountability is very much connected to outcomes. So if there is clarity on what a good outcome looks like, the chance of scaling is much better. A lot of times there’s not a good conversation on what a great outcome out of all the work that we do. And because there’s not that conversation, accountability cannot happen. You hire a sales rep and they say, Your goal is meetings, go and book meetings. It’s hard to scale that because the person might not have a good onboarding, doesn’t know who’s the customer, didn’t got good training, and then you just expect that meetings to show up booking. Their accountability is clear to be on both ends, which is, Okay, I want to get a point where I want the outcome will be that in six months time, you are able to have this amount of meetings per month. How the calculation comes from? I don’t know. It comes from this process thinking. On the other side, I’m going to be accountable for your expertise.

[00:24:14.160] – Hugo Pereira

As such, I’m going to make sure that you have access to A, B, C, and D in this training. That’s how you scale trust and accountability. Shared outcome understanding and making transparency a norm, not the exception. First off, you need to really know what’s your stretch of comfort with transparency. I know everyone says they want to be transparent, but you really have to know, can your team handle the transparency that you want to invoke or implement before you implement it? I see a lot of people that want to be transparent, but they are not able to cope with the transparency.

[00:24:41.630] – Joran

People want it, but to actually B, it’s a completely different thing. You need feedback loops, right? If you want to be transparent, people have to be able to give, as you mentioned, pushback, so they should also be able to receive feedback. How do you set up proper feedback loops so people can actually get their recognition, maybe, and even the direction they need without the always endless meetings?

[00:25:03.000] – Hugo Pereira

Well, I think there’s a formal and informal. I think we’re remote. It’s even more important, this feedback loops, because before you were in the office, when everyone was in the office, you get more frequent feedback loops informally, the coffee, et cetera. Let’s have a conversation. Someone might just bring you aside with remote. I think you have to formalize the informal check-ins. For example, I have a notification every month or every two months, depending on the person on the team, I want to do an informal check-in. When I really just say, Hey, do you have five minutes or do you have 30 minutes? I want to do an informal check-in with you. I just have a conversation. I say, I had a coffee chat. It’s not the same, but I see the openness is much bigger. I prepare the question beforehand. It’s not about how are you doing? That’s The third question is the curiosity. What has been one thing you have learned the most in the last three months that you are proud of? What has surprised you about the team that you didn’t know about? What’s one behavior on the team that you see growing that you are not happy with, that you’re just afraid of speaking up with?

[00:26:01.380] – Hugo Pereira

If you don’t want to share, don’t want to share, it’s perfectly fine with you. You start having prepared questions that the person might not have full preparation, but that’s fine because over time, they start getting used to think about these bigger questions on the team. The other one is, I I at least have that on a quarterly basis, the whole team has to come together for an off-site. One, two days, digital, online, offline, depends on the momentum. It just has to happen. On a quarterly basis, you need to do a proper off-site. And a proper off-site needs to have a feedback loop, a proper feedback loop on the company, on the business, on the way that the team operates. Then normally, the way I see it is that it’s like a design organization, like a product development. You put a roadmap and you say, Okay, we have all this backlog of behaviors you want to implement. Which one goes on the roadmap for the next three months. People say, Oh, I want to get more understanding of each other’s strengths. There’s a bi-weekly team presentation where someone prepare something very specific about their center of expertise, something they are working on that they want specific feedback, or something not connected to the company that they are very passionate about.

[00:27:00.000] – Hugo Pereira

That’s it. They just use that spot. Then three months later, we just say, Was this valuable? Was it too often? Was it less often? Let’s reduce it. A recent one, for example, we killed the weekly retrospectives. That meeting on a Friday, going around, we just kill it. We just said, Okay, everyone is tired. Let’s move it as synchronous. Dedicated channel. Everyone shares what went well, what would be better, what is prepared for next week. Kudos. Insight, everyone just shares on a Slack channel or a Teams channel. That’s it. I’ve been doing that for six months. Everyone loves it. That was our design. But it’s like product development, just for culture. Backlog, roadmap of behavior, implementation, feedback, embedding, scaling. I know it’s a bit strange that people just have to think about people design the same way as they think about product design. Just you play You do behaviors and you experiment, you scale what works.

[00:27:47.900] – Joran

Yeah, and in the end, you listen to feedback. People don’t like certain things, like have a meeting at the end of Friday because they might want to close sooner or they want to do other stuff or they just don’t want to have a meeting on Friday afternoon. Then, figure something else out.

[00:28:01.120] – Hugo Pereira

Sometimes you can even reward behavior. I had an example of someone that was busy for two weeks, the weekly perspective, and I asked, what stops you from sharing timely the weekly respective? It’s an important moment. It’s a moment of consideration of the week for people to read, feel what the team is doing, et cetera. The person just realized, Yeah, I’m being sloppy. I don’t have a reason behind. I’m sorry, never going to happen again. It was just a small call out. Why does it work? It’s not because I’m calling out as a boss, I’m calling out because we agreed as a team. The person feels, Okay, I agree to this. I was there. I’m failing the team. It’s not about failing the boss. I’m failing the team. It’s a shared commitment. It’s no longer like just a contractual conversation.

[00:28:39.220] – Joran

If you make it a shared commitment and everybody agrees to do things, they are going to feel the responsibility to do it. If they don’t, at least it’s not just you calling them out. This is a leadership behavior, right? You’re not telling them exactly what to do. What leadership behavior could kill morale or momentum? What shouldn’t you do as a leader, as a SaaS founder?

[00:28:59.640] – Hugo Pereira

Yeah, Well, the obvious one everyone talks about is micromanagement. Everyone hates micromanagement. The only thing I always mention about micromanagement is to understand the difference of being in the details and being a micromanager. Sometimes people that join the company, even those people confused being in the details for micromanagement. I know it’s a bit of maybe a less popular opinion, but a lot of people confuse the founders or team leader’s ambition to be the details, to understand the business, to understand what’s happening versus being micromanager. They’re confused and they feel that they’re in control and sometimes tells more about them than the actual behavior of the company. Sometimes in the teams, I have a conversation saying, Hey, for you, I sometimes I’m doing this. If you feel uncomfortable, it’s not because I don’t trust you. I like to write articles. For one of the companies, I’m writing the articles on the social media of the CEO. Why am I writing it? Why am I spending time on that? It’s because it helps me understand the CEO, the vision, the company, the product. It puts me to do the work. Otherwise, I’m just a glorified fractional CMO, which is not idea, it’s to be an operator.

[00:29:59.700] – Hugo Pereira

But I have to clarify that, for example, with the head of content to say, Hey, it’s not because I don’t trust your content. I think you are phenomenally great. You write a great content. This is for me to make sure I stay in touch with the reality of what we are building so I can support you. If you see me create a content, it’s not because I don’t trust it, it’s just because I want to stay on top of things. If I’m doing too much, just let me know. If I’m overreaching and you want to take the lead, just let me know. But just know that this is why it’s happening. It helps a lot because a person doesn’t feel like it’s micromanagement. I understand why he’s doing this. It’s not about the role, it’s not about Ownership is about doing the best for the company and just spreading work better. That’s one, micromanagement with understanding the difference of being in the details. Indecisiveness is a terrible one. It’s better to have, even if it’s a terrible leader, better to have one that is clear than one that is not clear because that’s terrible. Indecisiveness leads to over-optimising for consensus, not knowing where to make a choice.

[00:30:51.480] – Hugo Pereira

Sometimes companies fail just because you have a founder or a CEO that says, Okay, which ICT do we go after? All the three of them. Which use case? The seven I’m like, Okay, but which market we put a budget? This one. But then the next week is like, No, but it was only this one. I remember one that was killing me. As a B2B SaaS company, we had to agree our priority markets were one, two, three, four. This is it. It’s ruthless. There’s nothing else that matters. Not even a week later, there was some big shot company out of the middle list that wanted to make a large order. The CEO was like, No, we have to accommodate this. I’m like, We just agreed that you’re going to say no to everything. Yeah, but this will become our top 15 customer It doesn’t matter. We had to do regulation, compliance, create a local company. So many things beyond that. I’m like, We just agreed to this. In this, I’ve been asked, Is that a problem? The last one that kills morale is emotional inconsistency. You think about Toxis. Toxis is like someone that just evokes the blame culture.

[00:31:48.330] – Hugo Pereira

There’s always a blame on someone else. There’s always someone to blame. I think it kills momentum where we don’t take the kids for the… The team feel. Any team feels, if you’re always blaming something else.

[00:32:00.800] – Joran

Yeah, nice. Let’s start wrapping things up a little bit. If we stay fully on this topic, I would have to ask you, can you summarize your best advice regarding a team and culture in one sentence to help SaaS founders be the team through scale? What would it be?

[00:32:17.560] – Hugo Pereira

I think the best is to never lose sight of why you started in the first place and why does it still matter to keep building. I know it’s cliché, but ultimately, over time, people are still driven by purpose. You join a company for what you can do, but stay at the company for what you can become. That’s the reason behind. There may be other ones, but ultimately, if you stay long in a startup or scale up, it’s because you feel you are evolving, you are becoming better, you have opportunities. But you have to love what you do or what you sell for. For a founder, the best way to evolve a culture is to stay close to the why. I know, again, it sounds cliché, but it means that that’s what people follow at the end of the day. They might follow the founder, they might follow the product, et cetera, but they follow the mission. They stay for the mission, let’s say. To evolve a culture, you don’t evolve a culture, you don’t lose the original DNA. Keep reminding yourself why you’re doing it in the first place. The hardest part is to think about why am I still doing this?

[00:33:09.030] – Hugo Pereira

Why did I start in the first place? What was the pain point I wanted to solve? Why do I still believe in it? Be honest with yourself in these questions. Tide those to rituals, hiring, decision-making processes, codify what matters. The biggest advice is this part. Stick to the why, to your own why in the first place.

[00:33:27.780] – Joran

Let’s go to the final three questions. First, we’re going to look into the future. What should SaaS founders, in your opinion, prepare for in the next 2-3 years?

[00:33:38.800] – Hugo Pereira

I’m having two angles, one from the people point of view since it’s a core theme here. The other is from generic B2B SaaS. For the next 2-3 This is when I think people should start expecting slightly slower deal cycles and larger buying committees. I think there’s higher and higher cost of acquisition costs that are coming. Channels are more saturated. It’s harder to stand out. The whole way book is shifting from high volume capture to more deep relationship building. I’ll just say for the founders in the next two, three years, really try to understand which deep relationship activities can you build to make sure that your startup succeeds. It can be close events. It doesn’t matter. It can be close events with the customers. It can be that you have to expand through partners. It can be that you have to spend more time doing community building, use generated content, if that’s the case of the product. But yeah, I think this whole high volume capture, it’s going to get tougher and tougher. It’s not impossible. You can see crazy. It is still happening. But even those ones of high volume capture, like we just talk about Lovable or Cursor of this world, they have a deep relationship with their community.

[00:34:44.240] – Hugo Pereira

You can see it’s being built. Even clay, which is a really tough technical product to master, they’re having a deep relationship building with their partners, and that’s how they’re building scale. Founders can prepare for that. The other one for the founders is stop having this conversation about brand versus demand generation or brand versus lead generation. It all helps. Stop thinking about that. From a people point of view, just don’t rush hiring in the next two, three years. If you hire for fit, hire people that really stick and grow with you. Hiring is getting expensive. Pay attention to which organization people want to build.

[00:35:18.420] – Joran

Well, we’re going to dive into revenue stages. This is going to be advice purely for SaaS founders just starting out and growing to 10K MRR. What advice would you give them?

[00:35:27.520] – Hugo Pereira

I can talk about my own mistake, I was trying at 0-10K MRR, which was the first stage, I was trying to prove scale, and I realized I’m not even at the scale stage. I should have been proving value. That means the cliché of male product market fit first, period. That’s the most cliché. There’s not even an advice, it’s just none. I think building in public is definitely something that if you are comfortable with, it’s worth it for accountability. One major mistake is to prioritize conversations over conversions. I was caught up on conversion rates because that’s when I came from a point of view at such an early stage, it is not worth it. I was like, Oh, website visits, conversion, demo trials, activation. Oh, the conversion is not good. I was trying to activate for conversions, but there was just like 100 demos in three, four months. It’s not a big number. Why I was so caught up on conversions rather than having deep conversations to figure out which are the best 5, 10 potential customers and really understand working with those. That prioritize deep conversations with the right fit over convergence, because that’s definitely one that I misshaped completely.

[00:36:34.950] – Hugo Pereira

I was looking at efficiency rather than insights. From zero to 10K MRR is all about conversations and insights and not convergence and efficiency, and that was a massive error on my side.

[00:36:44.440] – Joran

Nice. Let’s assume now we passed 10K MRR and we’re going to grow towards 10 million AR. It’s a huge step. You definitely have to focus on conversions. What advice would you give SaaS founders here?

[00:36:55.920] – Hugo Pereira

The jump is so big that I was even thinking, I cannot really see a jump that big. I was even like, I need to have a two-tier situation. Just to hit the first 1 billion ARR, that jump is massive. Easier said than done. But for me, the 1 billion ARR is just have figured out just one Same channel, in persona or ICP, one use case, you can repeat and repeat the scale over and over and over again. I think over time, I see over and over again. In my first two startups, because we were in that journey, we hit 1 billion ARR, but we hit in the wrong way. We couldn’t scale. We talent square, for example, where we were acquiring, we were activating, we were activating, we were retaining, but it was not the same customer. They were all different. Was enterprise, was small, was HR, was not HR. Then we just had multiple channels, multiple personas, use cases that we couldn’t pass beyond. The advice is to, yeah, just focus. I think the 10K to 1 million is incredible focus to get a repeatable growth motion. Easier said than done, of course. But yeah, that one use case, one channel, one persona or one ICP, just hyper focus on that, even if it fails.

[00:38:04.320] – Hugo Pereira

If you’re talking about the 1-10, which is another whole jump, and even 1-10, there’s the many phases of 1-10. But if there is one thing I see that didn’t happen often in the ones I worked with, where it’s 5, 6, 7 million days, too late, they start using their community. Only when they got in trouble, they start looking at references, co-marketing, feedback loops, building a community of their customers or user or partners. By then, Everyone was either annoyed, churn was increasing, they were stuck. So yeah, use your early community as your… Hubspot likes to call it your flywheel. I think that would be… From a people point of view, from 1-10, I think this is where really hiring functional leaders that are stage fit are critical here. I think there’s so many mistakes on hiring at this stage. I’ll say, don’t hire job titles. If someone comes because they want to be a VP of marketing with two people, it’s not the right higher point. You’re not the VP of marketing with two people under you. If they care too much about that, you already are in their home stage fit. That’s it.

[00:39:09.800] – Joran

Nice. Let me try to summarize. If we take it all the way to the beginning, I guess. Culture starts with the founding team, right? Their mindset, behavior, and their hustle. It’s not going to be purely built on a good product or big client. Culture is a seed that grows. It’s either building on toxic or trust. It’s the hidden behavior when you’re not in the room. It is about the values and rituals. So what do you want to reward? When we talk about failing, success can mask confusion, as you mentioned. Processes break, feedback become hearsay, rules become blurry. The founder always want to have the final say, or you’re going to have lack of alignment. So you don’t agree on the ICP or the clients you want to go after for. So don’t do that. But when we look about scale up succeeding, they go really well towards the different growth stages you mentioned. So the hustle, first motion of processes and repeatable systems. They own the why Now, the why us story. They never lose sight on why they started in the first place. They have high ownership in the company. You want the people to push back on things so they are comfortable and they care about sharing it.

[00:40:11.200] – Joran

Clear expectations on the expected behavior to build trust while scaling. Deep customer ties. Organization has to work as a learning system, have a feedback culture system, do informal checkings with prepared questions, and have shared commitments on things you agreed upon, and ideally do quarterly offsites to talk about behavior and expectations. When we talk about failing again, I guess don’t have a hero culture, so don’t clarify overwork. Do not stop listening to the customers. Do not micromanage in decisiveness, not making decisions you need to make, or creating a blame culture. When you want to grow to 10K MR, prioritize deep conversations instead of conversions, and then growing towards 10 million AR, chop it up, 1 million AR, focus on one ICP channel, and keep repeating that, and then 1 to 10 million leverage community partners, create a fly and higher stage-fit people.

[00:41:02.540] – Hugo Pereira

I’m going to have to say better.

[00:41:04.140] – Joran

There you go. It’s all your words, just my notes. Cool. What we’re going to do, Hugo, we’re going to link towards your book, right? We talked about it, but then in the podcast, where can people find it if they wanted to read more?

[00:41:15.790] – Hugo Pereira

The book is available on Amazon, so that’s easy access. Then, yeah, connect me on LinkedIn for any other topics. I try to be as responsive as possible. I love to work asynchronous, so even sometimes I have conversations with voice notes to accommodate requests left and right. But yeah, I love to engage in conversations about building SaaS businesses. I’m always eager to learn more.

[00:41:38.060] – Joran

We’re definitely going to add a link to your LinkedIn profile, Hugo Pereira, currently in Portugal, but living in the Netherlands. He’s the author of the book, Teams in Hell: How to End Bad Management. Definitely, this is going to go live during holiday season. So order the book on Amazon and actually read it in your holiday destination. For people listening, leave us a review if you can. That It takes literally 10 seconds, but it’s going to help us to boost the algorithms. We’re going to add a poll to the Spotify episode. Let me know what you thought of the episode so I can always improve my guests, questions, anything else. Again, thanks for coming on, Hugo. Thank you.

[00:42:15.400] – Hugo Pereira

I appreciate.

[00:42:15.850] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast.

[00:42:19.980] – Speaker 3

You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.