Most SaaS founders think they know how their company is doing. Revenue is coming in, the bank account looks healthier at the end of the month than at the beginning. So everything must be fine, right? Not so fast. Anthony Nitsos, the Founder and Lead Guru at SaaS Gurus, compares it to flying a plane through thick clouds with no instruments. You think you’re above the ground. You feel like the speed is right. But you have absolutely no idea, and that’s a terrifying way to run a company. Anthony joined Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards on this episode of SaaS That App to unpack why finance is the strategic engine that keeps the whole operation from slamming into a mountain nobody saw coming.
If you're building or scaling a software product, these three titles can look interchangeable on paper. In reality, they solve different problems — and choosing the wrong one at the wrong stage is an expensive mistake. A fractional CTO creates strategic clarity part-time. A full-time CTO owns technology as a permanent competitive function. A tech lead keeps your engineers executing at quality. The right answer has less to do with your org chart and more to do with what your business actually needs this quarter.
Generic AI agents sound like a shortcut: plug in a tool, connect a few apps, and let automation run. For many mid-market companies, that promise breaks down fast. The issue usually isn’t that AI “doesn’t work.” It’s that generic agents are built for the average workflow, the average data quality, and the average risk tolerance. Mid-market operations are rarely average. They’re complex enough to need real governance and integration, but lean enough that failures hit harder and faster.
Most CTOs come from startups, big tech, or maybe a stint in consulting. Kjell Hedstrom commanded tanks in the Swedish army, wired up air traffic control at Heathrow, and built software that guides brain surgery. Now he’s the CTO of Onfleet, the platform powering last-mile delivery for thousands of businesses, and he’s bringing every ounce of that safety-critical background into how his teams build software with AI agents. In a recent conversation on the SaaS That App podcast with hosts Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards, Kjell shared how his unconventional career shaped a philosophy that treats rigor not as bureaucracy, but as the thing that actually lets you move fast.
Ruby on Rails works best when a small team can ship a cohesive product fast, but many teams undermine that advantage by adopting hyperscale-style infrastructure too early (e.g., excessive AWS services, Kubernetes, microservices, multiple CI/CD pipelines, and heavy observability)
Here’s an honest take: AI agents are genuinely useful — but not for everything, not for everyone, and not without some real work to set them up correctly.
In the latest episode of SaaS That App, Joe, the Chairman and CEO of Thryv, shared how he turned a traditional directory business into a $4B global powerhouse, and why the same principles still apply in today’s AI-driven SaaS world.
Still making every tech call at your SaaS company? Learn the signs it's time to stop being your own CTO — and what to do instead.
If your Ruby on Rails app feels fast in development and staging, but slows down in production, you’re not imagining it. Many database performance problems only become visible when real users (and real data volumes) hit your system at the same time. This article breaks down why N+1 queries slip through, which “quiet” database issues tend to surface only under load, and how to detect and fix them before they become incidents.
Most SaaS companies do not hit a wall because they stop shipping. They hit a wall because they keep shipping things that feel productive but do not improve the business. That was one of the clearest themes from Daniel Layfield’s conversation with Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards on SaaS That App. Drawing on experience from Codecademy, Uber, and Diligent, Daniel laid out a view of scale: growth is not just about product velocity; it is about solving the right problem at the right stage.