Kosta Panagoulias
Co-founder of Web4Realty. Not your typical SaaS founder 💯
Free
117
4.97
Expertise
Most people I speak to nowadays get too fancy when it comes to sales. They automatically jump into paid ads and running campaigns, only to see their money go down the drain with no new sales. Old school outbound sales still work. I personally closed the first 700-1000 customers for my company through cold calling and outbound email marketing. Outbound works!
Often times, the only thing stopping you from growing, are your own limitations in your head. Getting someone with an unfiltered view to brainstorm with, usually leads to some big "AHA" moments. These small conversations can help change the trajectory of your business.
The most important yet overlooked department in a company, is customer support. Similarly, the most important metric in the longevity of a SaaS business is churn. Some of the best ways to improve churn is to fine-tine your customer success processes. I have spent several years testing and fine-tuning several strategies that improve customer success, keep clients happy, and help keep churn low.
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.
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.
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 (62)
Kosta inspires and motivates me to keep going with my ideas and make it happen. He also helps me to confirm some of my concerns and what I could do further to expand my idea. Very inspiring :)
Kosta was very knowledgeable. He provided me with strategies that worked for him and I believe because I am bootstrapping my company as well will be effective for me. He is friendly and really took an interest to my startup. The help he provided was priceless. Looking forward to speaking with him again in the future.
Had a great chat with Kostas about starting my own business and how to go about it, which mindset to adopt and what to do. He was able to give me real examples of his own experiences that applied to my situation. I liked that he's very down-to-earth, knowledgeable and friendly
Kosta's insights were direct, grounded in truth that helped me flip my mindset and get out of my own way.
Kosta is awesome. Highly recommended. Our conversation was a great collaboration. He understood our product and market very quickly, and together we came up with some action items that are easily testable in the next week or so.
Super helpful! Thank you!
Kosta was really helpful for us in getting a better understanding of the beginnings of entrepreneurship. Thanks for the help!
Kosta helped me enormously with an issue I had about an equity split by making 1 small suggestion. Additionally he helped me with other questions .. but this one was a hurdle we were unable to get over.
Thank you Kosta!
Great session as always.
Kosta was great to speak to. He listened and understood the situation quickly and provided sagacious advice and direction. He has a proven track record to draw from. I am going to speak to him again soon. Highly recommended! Thanks again for your time Kosta.
Kosta was absolutely fantastic. He's had founding experiences in the trenches and knows the right mindset to power through them. Some fantastic insights on competition, thinking about markets, and execution. Great motivation boost after this call.
Great call with Kosta! As we both have the same clients (realtors), it was very interesting to exchange on the way to approach them. If you need some help with an outbound marketing strategy, Kosta is definitely the person to speak to!
Really enjoyed speaking with Kosta. His enthusiastic spirit helped turn around the overwhelm I was feeling. He shared some great ideas for my company around outbound market strategy and techniques. Thank you!
Kosta was super helpful and raised some really important points that I was able to take onboard. It’s awesome to know I was speaking to someone who managed to bootstrap a very successful SAAS company. That knowledge is priceless. Thanks Kosta.
Kosta has a ton of experience, and it definitely showed. He gave me some great ideas to begin filling our sales pipeline to grow our business.
Kosta gave me a scheme of building outbound marketing for 2 companies I work with. He showed a way how to do it more effective and helped to change my point of view about this marketing approach
Honestly, things got stuck in my mind with the SAAS I am building, talking to Kosta, who have been in my shoes before, cleared my next move and cleared my vision forward!!, Thanks Kosat,
Kosta knows the essence of marketing at heart
Great discussion, very inspirational and to-the-point. Kosta gave me some new angles to approach the issues I'm facing, and inspired me to keep pushing my boundaries. I highly suggest him!
Really appreciate the time Kosta took to discuss things with me. He had a much different perspective that made a lot of sense. I'm going to implement the changes he suggested.
Humble. Kind. Had some very valuable insights.
I found the time to be really well-spent and I'm glad I chose to reach out to Kosta. He was very supportive and enthusiastic but also had some specific suggestions and ideas on approaches. I'm looking forward to continuing to speak with Kosta going forward.
Kosta's a great guy! Had a really useful chat, covering starting a business, podcasting and mindset. Such a nice guy and has had some pretty amazing experience. I'd definitely recommend a call!
I had a great talk with Kosta, about things like building a remote team, how to start a company and about some of the things that he went through in the early stages of building his startup, and about doing sales for a startup in the early stages.
Kosta is a great person with tremendous experience as a startup founder. Our discussion was helpful and very inspiring.
Kosta was a great listener and able to zero in on exactly what I need to work on to achieve my long-term business goals. He is also personable and I felt comfortable speaking with him. I highly recommend him as a mentor, especially for SaaS bootstrapping!
Kosta was very candid and generous in sharing his knowledge and experience, thank you!
I had a 30-minute call with Kosta in which we talked about the technical and marketing stuff of building, launching and growing a podcast. It was super helpful as I was able to learn all the lessons he has gained from running the two podcasts he has been running for the last years, in just half an hour.
On point! When asked 'What would you do if you were in my situation', Kosta had extremely solid advance, particularly understanding the bootstrapping situation. A pleasure to talk to and get specific actionable next step advice!
Kosta was a great sounding board when I was running him through some monetisation ideas for my website. He offered the more specific path of getting to where I want to be which is exactly what I was after. Looking forward to catching up with him again.
It was an amazing call with kosta, he has a really refined and unorthodox point of a view on a lot of things which i liked. His suggestions will be really crucial! :)
I really enjoyed my call with Kosta. It was helpful and inspiring to talk to somebody who's been in the trenches building a profitable SaaS company. He friendly, knowledgeable, and caring.
Kosta had some really insightful tidbits about scaling a startup with just b2b calls. He also was very generous about staying updated on my progress and giving me feedback on my call/email marketing scripts. I'm looking forward to staying in touch with Kosta.
I really appreciated Kosta's insights and tactics for growing my business. He got straight to the point, and explained why sales is such an important skill for a founder to develop. It goes hand in hand with growth. I highly recommend speaking with Kosta if you need help with growth.
Kosta is super knowledgeable within the growth space. We spoke about outbound and new channels to explore in the B2C space. Really enjoyed speaking with him!
It has been great to get to know Kosta and to ask him suggestion regarding out outbound process. Wonderful vibes, and hope this to be the first of many conversations. Thanks again!
My partner and I had an excellent chat with Kosta. He gave clear and actionable advice that was focused on moving the needle. Great chat!
Kostas was an excellent mentor! Really great insights!
Loved speaking with Kosta! He gave us great ideas on how to start selling it to our audience and what channels to use. He was very patient in answering my questions and helped me strategize my marketing outreach. It was really great connecting with him :)
Kosta helped me come up with ideas to work on my biggest client. He was very calm spoken and easy to follow. He has almost 10 years working on his remote business and it shows. If you need insights into the modern global business landscape you should book a session with him.
outstanding experience
Kosta is a brilliant mentor, everytime I meet with him he has a brilliant way of cutting through the noise, taking the time to understand our problem and then leaning on his experience to point us in the right direction. Ultimately saving us a huge amount of time and giving us a higher chance of success - thank you Kosta!
Absolutely great conversation, helping me understand a few critical things to keep in mind for bootstrapping our SaaS business.
It was a great chat with Kosta. He shared some interesting insights. Kosta was prepared for the meeting and addressed all my questions.
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!