SAAS Operators

E54: Become AI Native with Jim Benton from Adapt

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Jim Benton, CEO of Adapt, joins Rishabh, Jeremiah, and Jack to talk about what it actually looks like to build a company brain. Adapt connects all your tools, GitHub, Linear, HubSpot, Notion, Slack, and instead of scheduling tool calls one at a time like an MCP would, it swarms them. Hits everything at once, pulls the data back, and runs the best available model against it. That's why people say the answers look and feel different to Claude. The land vs. expand question kicks things off. Jim's take is that landing still matters, you've got to cut through the noise, but the real unlock is frictionless self-serve. Get people connected to a few tools fast. Let them hit the aha moment on their own. He tells a story about a CEO who signed up on a weekend, connected several tools, ran queries, and put a card in before sales could even reach out. That's the model. Jeremiah's been using Adapt long enough to notice his spend is about four times what he budgeted when he signed up, but he's not complaining. He understands what the brain means for token efficiency over time, and how sitting closer to the data gives you a real structural advantage over just piping Claude directly into your stack. The conversation gets into AI adoption inside companies, and it's not who you'd expect resisting. Senior executives are rolling their sleeves up. Younger employees in delivery roles feel the threat more directly. Rishabh's EA told him her goal is to have Claude handle 100% of her tasks. Jim's response is nuanced: the EQ parts of the job still need to be human. What you want is AI handling the computer thinking, and people doing the people thinking. Jim closes with what Adapt is actually becoming. A proactive reasoning engine. Something that spots the pattern you never thought to ask about, cross-references a product decision from six months ago with a deal you lost last week, and brings it to you before you knew you needed it. TLDR: The AI natives don't want to work with the non-AI natives. Get in or get left behind.

E53: GaaS for SaaS with Ronak Shah and Ankit Patel

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Ronak Shah breaks down what the best SaaS brands look like from inside Gaas for SaaS. Rokt gets the top spot. Smaller than the others, but the most intentional operators on the list. They get the pay it forward model, they activate partnerships, and they understand that feedback is its own thing, separate from conversion. Proxima rounds it out, having graduated from e-commerce SMB into an enterprise play with Microsoft. The through line? The best SaaS operators are calm about AI. Engineers who've sat through a few hype cycles know that 90% of what's making noise right now isn't going to land. Then Jack pulls up a landing page he vibe coded with Profit AI. A Shopify page built by an agent using a VideoWise reference. Shoppable video widgets. A coupon code that redirects to checkout. The agent scraped the videos, built the section, and added features Jack didn't ask for. Jeremiah's take is that AI is putting a ceiling on what people will pay for SaaS. The build-it-yourself option has a real price now, and brands are going to start doing the math. Ankit brings the most grounded take of the episode. AI has unlocked the generalist. One person doing packaging, ads, landing pages, and branding without a team. He's running the experiment on Avi right now. 100 AI generated static ads aren't moving the needle any more than 15 hand-crafted ones did. Output is one thing. Impact is another. The conversation closes on something most people won't say out loud. Enterprises asking how to get on the right side of AI are going to get outcompeted by 2 people, a blank slate, and a stack of agents. TLDR: The tornado's coming.

E52: How AI Replaces People with Chase Mohseni from Creative OS

In this episode Jack, Rishabh, Chase and Jeremiah talk about how AI is changing the way they run their teams day to day. Rishabh challenged Chase on why he keeps getting pulled into problems, and his read was that Chase wants to keep his finger in the pot, so the honest move is to admit that and pick two things to drive well. We got tactical on how each of us is actually using AI right now. Rishabh has FERMÀT MCP connected to every internal system, customer data, and their own product, so he can build customer decks while pushing his daughter on the swing. He thinks humans are better deployed as empathy and joy centers, and computers should do the thinking. Chase has trained his AI tools to tell him when he's being dumb and they've literally told him to put the laptop down and go to bed. Jack shares how he built a QA skill that uses agent browser to test every piece of functionality in his app after each change, and recently watched it set up TikTok Shop and Amazon integrations from start to finish without him being involved. Chase walked through where Creative OS is heading. Canva, Figma and Adobe are going to eat the horizontal creative market, so they're going vertical on performance creative and building what he calls the creative loop, spark of an idea to finished data backed asset. The 90 day plan is to make everything work seamlessly inside Claude, Cursor, or whatever IDE the customer wants to work in. Rishabh pointed out that specialist roles are going away regardless. AI gets everyone to the 90th percentile easily, the 99th percentile is still hard and always will be. He's hiring high agency, high grit, high horsepower people and is indifferent to what they're specifically good at. We closed on the reality that we're all in an AI pilled bubble. Chase's wife works at a big company that just told employees they can maybe try ChatGPT if they want. There are hundreds of millions of people who haven't downloaded Claude yet and have no idea what we're talking about.

E50: The Future of Software Businesses with Maxx Blank from Triple Whale

This podcast features an in-depth conversation with Maxx Blank, one of the co-founders of Triple Whale. Maxx shares the company's journey from a simple ecommerce dashboard that Maxx wanted for his own Shopify brand, to an AI-native data platform that serves over 30,000 of the fastest growing Shopify stores. We talk about internal tensions (fighting at work) and leadership approaches when navigating a rapidly shifting technology landscape. As well as some uncomfortable truths. Maxx Blank has built an incredible business by asking the same question every Shopify's store owner asks, how does this make us money? With billions of dollars of orders flowing through Triple Whale, they have a pretty good idea.

E49: How To Build An App That’s Worth Buying with Varun Kundra

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Varun Kundra , co-founder of AfterSell, talks about how the business was built around post-purchase upsells on Shopify. The core product sits in the window between checkout and the order confirmation page, a moment where conversion rates on relevant offers can hit 5-15% when set up properly, and where the highest-performing stores see the biggest AOV lift. Varun walks through how AfterSell eventually caught the attention of ROKT, a much larger company running third-party offers in the same post-purchase space, which ultimately led to an acquisition. We talk about the decision to sell at 23 years old, and what drove it. AfterSell had incredible traction, but there’s a belief that the Shopify ecosystem has a ceiling. The list of companies that have scaled to meaningful size inside it is short, Klaviyo, Recharge, a handful of others. The exit to ROKT gave Varun and his co-founders liquidity and something arguably more valuable, a front-row seat to how a larger, well-run business actually operates. Management, performance reviews, culture building, commercial strategy. None of that existed inside AfterSell before the deal. The back half of the episode opens up into a broader conversation about management philosophy in a fast-moving environment. Rishabh makes the case that a lot of traditional management principles, like giving criticism in private, were built for a world where information moved slowly. That world is gone. Jack and Rishabh talk through what it looks like to run a team where almost everything happens in public channels, why top performers tend to self-select in that environment, and where the ethical lines still hold. Varun ties it back to the meta-skill that survives any wave of technology: learning how to run a business where the value you deliver exceeds what you charge, and what you charge exceeds what it costs to deliver.