Kosta Panagoulias
Co-founder of Web4Realty. Not your typical SaaS founder 💯
Free
31
4.92
Expertise
My company is 100% revenue-financed, meaning we've never taken a single dime from anyone. Maintaining a lean and disciplined ideology is what helped our company become profitable and cash flow positive, very early on. Keeping organized and accurate books and financial metrics is vital in any business, especially a startup.
Something I wish I did more of when growing my business, was bounce ideas off other people with experience. I've mentored and advised hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups about general business advise and direction. Sometimes, a fresh unbiased perspective is what it takes to get past any current hurdles and continue on your path to growth. I grew a company with no tech-knowledge, and no experience into a successful, turnkey SaaS. Believe me, I've been through it.
The most important metric in the longevity of a SaaS business is churn. If anyone told you they have a secret formula for solving churn, they are lying to you. However, I have spent several years testing and fine-tuning several strategies that help keep churn low. Unfortunately, most SaaS companies don't take churn as seriously as they should!
Mentor Toolkit
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool. It allows you to manage all of your social accounts in one interface, analyze performance, and schedule your posts.
Adroll
Adroll allows you to create retargeting campaigns. Retargeting is a very effective marketing strategy that can yield great returns when done correctly.
Intercom
Intercom is a communication app that allows you to engage with your users in a very meaningful and impactful way. Extremely useful for any SaaS company.
Trello
Trello is a product management tool that allows you to track progress on tasks in a visually appealing way. It's very customizable and has an endless amount of use cases.
Customer.io
Customer.io allows you to send automated communication to your users and contacts. You can segment your contacts how you wish, and send triggered messaging based on events that you assign.
Dropbox
Dropbox allows you to store, access and manage your files from any computer or mobile device. A great app to keep your team organized. Especially useful remote companies!
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an app that allows you to get deep insights and analytics into what your users are doing in your app. This is a very useful tool for SaaS companies in particular.
Salesforce
Every single business requires a CRM to manage contacts, leads, and clients. Salesforce is a very dynamic, customizable and extensive CRM with many capabilities.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a simple and easy email marketing platform. It's a great way to build subscriber lists, creating email newsletters, automated campaigns, A/B testing, and much more. Best of all, It's free!
Co-founder of Web4Realty
Since our launch in 2010, my partner and I bootstrapped our SaaS out of my parents basement, into 20+ full-time team members (and growing) in eight countries. We're 100% revenue-financed, and recently became a fully remote and distributed team. I helped grow and develop every facet of the company, from finance, sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, and services. I know what it takes to build and grow departments in a lean, affordable, and efficient manner with scalability in mind.
Founder Views
I host a weekly podcast, where I document my business journey. I talk about things I'm currently going through, thinking about, or just find interesting. From time to time, I also bring on other founders and successful people in SaaS to talk shop. Founder View is one of the top-rated SaaS podcasts, and has been downloaded over 10,000x in 30+ countries around the globe.
Bachelor of Commerce
Major in Accounting; Minor in Finance
My best written content
Reviews (17)
My session with Kosta was phenomenal! He has incredible insight and knowledge. He really thinks "outside the box" and considers all possibilities. His concept of "Don't have a plan B" really struck a chord with me. I fully enjoyed my online consultation with him and will book more in the future. Definitely give this guy some time - you'll get a lot of his experience and knowledge.
Kosta listened to me patiently, what separates him from others is the fact that he has himself bootstrapped and scaled his business. His questions and advice are to the point. He is willing to help founders and has an overall optimistic and encouraging tone. Look forward to learning from him.
Kosta helped me review marketing strategy for my SaaS company and opened my eyes to new possibilities I didn't think of before.
Kosta is one of those mentors that would ask all the right questions, listen attentively and then give you the advice that you need in one sentence. Thank you Kosta for helping me identify the bottle neck in my outbound sales method.
The mentoring session with Kosta was one of the best ones I ever had. I really appreciated his talk with his rich experience with his B2B SaaS service. He gave me lot of useful feedback and he will be a test user for our new product which will be launched soon!
I enjoyed speaking to Kosta. He gave me some specific tips that will help me launch my beta and focus on the right things (sales!). I will stay in touch with him and keep him posted on my beta launch.
I enjoyed speaking to Kosta. He gave me some specific tips that will help me launch my beta and focus on the right things (sales!). I will stay in touch with him and keep him posted on my beta launch.
Had a great talk with Kosta — I came to him for some insights around an acquisition marketing campaign that I was building out, but was having some second thoughts on. He gave me lots of clarity and some valuable insights that could have only come from an objective, 3rd party perspective. Really helpful speaking to him!
Kosta is friendly, patient, and understood our marketing goals for our new Saas. He offered a unique approach to get the word out about it - traditional sales - which I thought was brilliant. He had valid ideas and mentioned some data to look into that approach. He was very easy to talk with and said I could reach out whenever to share our progress. If you get the chance to bounce ideas around with him, I recommend it.
Kosta helped me with suggestions for retention (1) Better target audience in sales funnel, (2) Use user events to customize emails (3) Use user events to congratulate Aha moment success (4) Tighten response times on customer support - He was very helpful, and I could recommend him.
We're thinking of hiring for various remote roles and Kosta gave some awesome advice. His team is fully remote, and he has a bunch of experience in how to hire and manage a remote team without breaking your company. Many takeaways from our call. Not to mention, the last 5 minutes, where Kosta randomly dropped a nuclear bomb of an idea on something completely unrelated which could potentially have a massive impact.
Kosta helped me get more clarity about my target customers and customer acquisition. He patiently replied with in-depth answers to all of my questions. Truly a fantastic conversation. Thank you, Kosta!
Kosta and I have had a practical conversation about the nature of entrepreneurship - if there's such a thing as going "too fancy" with tools, and the grind of getting initial customers. Prior to the conversation, I had prepared a list of topics. I thought it would be too large of a list to cover, but during the first 20 minutes of the call, we already had gone through most. A very useful conversation where he dropped some unexpected wisdom-bombs on how to keep people engaged with your organization. Much appreciated. Thanks, Kosta (Y).
Kosta delivered really great value and amazing insights. Got many take aways and ideas to work on. Thank you for the great session!
Kosta is a supportive and jovial mentor. He is passionate about helping others succeed, and I would refer him to all of my aspiring tech operator friends.
Thanks for sharing your story and growth advise for my startup
It was an absolute pleasure to meet with Kosta and hear his relevant insight. Well appreciated that he made the time for me. Thank you Kosta - I'll keep you updated on progress!