SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
Inside the Mind of 5million Brands: AI, Market Signals & the Rise of Charm
What can SaaS founders learn from a company tracking 5 million brands in real time?
In this episode, Alex Nitsenzon, CEO of Charm, takes us behind the scenes of a lean SaaS company that's quietly revolutionising how e-commerce data is collected, categorised, and actioned.
But this conversation isn't just about e-commerce—it’s a playbook for SaaS companies building in complex, data-rich markets.
From AI-powered classification systems to scoring models that distil messy signals into clarity, Alex shares how his 22-person team scaled a sophisticated intelligence platform without bloated headcount or over-engineered sales.
Key takeaways for SaaS leaders:
- Why composite scoring beats vanity metrics—and how to build your own
- How to turn publisher partnerships into a demand gen channel
- The right time to hire senior sales (hint: not before customer-facing immersion)
- How Charm automated lead gen with smart use of AI tools
- Why TikTok’s rise holds critical lessons for product-led awareness
Whether you’re scaling with a lean team, refining your ICP, or hunting for better signal in your GTM motion—this episode delivers practical, founder-tested strategies you can run with.
It’s not about watching the market—it’s about listening to it intelligently.
What drew you personally to the world of SaaS?
Speaker 2:It's like a really exciting challenge to create a solution.
Speaker 1:What do you think have been some of the biggest technical or strategic challenges that you've had to work to overcome?
Speaker 2:Creating uniform mapping across all of these brands.
Speaker 1:How do you niche in a way that works for marketing at the same time as growing three different personas?
Speaker 2:Really trying to leverage our data as much as possible, because that's what customers care the most about.
Speaker 1:Brands out there thinking do I get on Instagram, Do I get on TikTok? What's the data telling you?
Speaker 2:We're getting incredible feedback from every type of brand that we speak to, figuring out their strategy as soon as possible for launching.
Speaker 1:What are maybe some qualities that you look for in a candidate when you're hiring?
Speaker 2:The most successful people are the ones who can read the room and identify the opportunities where they can make an impact.
Speaker 1:To another episode of SaaS Stories. Today, I'm joined by Alex Nitsenzon, all the way from New York, CEO of Charm. Welcome, Alex.
Speaker 2:Hi, joanna, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your journey with Charm. What led you to Charm, what were the problems that Charm aims to solve and what drew you personally to the world of SaaS.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've been in e-commerce data my whole career. Actually, prior to Charm, I was at another market intelligence business called SimilarWeb for about seven years, and when one of the roles I had there was, I led their data acquisition group, and someone on my team actually discovered Charm and brought it to us and said this looks like a really interesting business with some great data. I got to know the company a little bit. I was really fascinated by what they were doing.
Speaker 2:When you think about the world of e-commerce, what we've seen over recent years is really this prevalence of new brands coming to the market and going direct to consumer. New brands launch every day, and while a lot of them have aspirations to sell through retail channels or sell on Amazon, platforms like Shopify have made it so easy to sell D2C that everyone's going direct to consumer as well, and at the same time, there isn't really an effective platform for measuring the performance of all these D2C brands, and so it seemed like a really exciting challenge to kind of create a solution that would allow us to track and analyze about 5 million brands across all categories and markets globally, across all key performance metrics like their social audience, growth and engagement, their reseller distribution, their traffic, their advertising activity, and help our customers really understand who's growing the fastest across. You know whatever category that they're interested in.
Speaker 1:Five million. That's amazing, wow, I mean, with such an enormous data set, what do you think have been some of the biggest technical or strategic challenges that you've kind of had to work to overcome?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think, kind of the first one is really creating a uniform mapping across all of these brands. You know, these brands exist in all different e-commerce platforms, all different systems, in all different countries and all different languages. And you know, the first kind of major technical challenge is being able to effectively categorize all of them into a uniform taxonomy so that you can have kind of an apples to apples perspective, right, you don't want to be comparing like a sneaker brand to a cosmetics brand, because that really wouldn't make much sense for the customer when you're creating all the scores that analyze them. And so we've, you know, applied a lot of large language models and AI techniques where we've customized these models to help us with this gargantuan task, and, you know, taking details around how the brand describes itself, how the products are described. That allows us to classify each brand into a specific category and taxonomy. So that's been a major undertaking.
Speaker 2:And then I think another really big one is actually being able to collect all these really disparate signals about each brand, right, because what's really important in today's market is to get a kind of a holistic perspective on how these brands are doing.
Speaker 2:You know, one brand may be doing really well on Instagram or Facebook, another may be doing great on TikTok and another may be doing really well in getting you know distribution across many online retailers, and how do you kind of compare that and have you know what's better, right? That's what a lot of our customers would ask like how do I look at this data and make sense of it? And so that kind of presented two challenges that we had to solve. One is to make sure that we were comprehensively capturing all of these different we call them channels of data for every brand across this whole. You know millions of brands that we track. But then the second is creating a uniform modeling mechanism, which we call the charm growth and charm success scores that allow us to create one singular view on every brand's performance in the market relative to their category, and that is basically a composite across all these different channels that we're tracking, so that our customers can rely on just a singular metric to understand the brand and how much traction it's getting.
Speaker 1:Right, that's really interesting. We'll definitely talk about AI in a second. But just coming back to some of the brands that you work with, do you mainly work with bigger retailers or can this also be used by smaller retailers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question.
Speaker 2:So today our customer base kind of falls into three main cohorts.
Speaker 2:We work with large retailers like Ulta and QVC that are using us for merchandising, so they want to optimize their assortment based on, you know, the best new, emerging brands within any category.
Speaker 2:The second cohort of customer, the second vertical of customer we work with, are investors. So these are typically private venture capital or private equity investors that are looking to source and diligence on consumer investment opportunities. And there, you know, you have very big investors that want to find brands that are later in their maturity and lifecycle, or some investors that are very early stage and want to find brands that are basically at an inception level, and so they use our data and our scoring to help identify brands at the right stage of the lifecycle and then do competitive analysis. And then the third segment that we support, the third cohort of customers, are what we kind of call B2B services, and these are agencies or SaaS companies or 3PLs anyone who sells a service or solution to a brand and they're using our data to identify the brands that are going to be the best fit for whatever service or solution they're offering.
Speaker 1:Okay, so three different personas. How does your go-to-market strategy work then? How do you kind of niche in a way that works for marketing at the same time as growing three different personas?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So we have leaned really heavily into publisher partnerships. We've developed, you know, relationships with publishers at different kind of focus areas. So, for example, within retail and investing, we try to partner with specialty publications like Cosmetic, executive Women or Women's Wear Daily, things like that, and we basically provide editorial support with our data right. So they're creating content and articles and they're using our data as a key kind of pillar and supporting details for the content they're putting out and that's allowed us to penetrate these audiences in a very focused way. And we do that across all of the key verticals we're going after. And then on our own side, we're constantly putting out fresh content. We're really trying to leverage our data as much as possible, because that's what customers care the most about and that's what's most exciting for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you seen any changes in content that resonates and does well, I feel like, because of AI, people are moving away from the written word and more towards, maybe, videos. Have I got it right?
Speaker 2:So I think that from like a sales perspective, we have tinkered with video a bit. It's hard to do that at scale. Still, I think that from a brand marketing perspective, we're seeing a lot of that with social commerce, obviously, and TikTok shop and all the trends that are happening there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting. Speaking of scaling, how old is Charm now?
Speaker 2:So Charm is four years old now, and I came on board as CEO at the end of 2023.
Speaker 1:And so what in your experience of some of the biggest scaling challenge has been?
Speaker 2:So you know I think undoubtedly it's it's been on on the product and engineering side, as you service really big enterprise customers. Going through the hurdles of creating a platform that is enterprise, ready to support those types of customers, creates a lot of obstacles and is a tough hill to climb. We spent a lot of time, you know, rebuilding our infrastructure and rethinking, you know, the architecture around how we were doing everything from data collection to modeling, to make sure that it was, you know, going to be able to sustain the type of demand that we were going to be getting. On the other side, I mean, we have some customers that are consuming data on hundreds of thousands of brands and millions of data points on a monthly basis and taking that into their own internal models to do further analysis, and we had to be able to, you know, build a system that could sustain that. And then I think the other side is to.
Speaker 2:You know, we've tried to keep the team very lean we're, in total, only 22 people now and figuring out how to, you know, operate, go to market at scale when you have a very lean team. I think is also something that was a bit of a learning curve and now we've gotten pretty good at. We use a lot of AI tooling. We use, you know, tools like Clay, which has gotten very popular. We use, you know, tools like Clay, which has gotten very popular, obviously, and ChatGPT. You know integrations built out that can customize messaging at scale and really make tailored communication to leads as they're coming in and things like that to accelerate pipeline development, and that seems to be working quite well for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think this is probably a good spot to talk about AI. Actually, that's really interesting. I'd love to learn more about the different types of AI you use, and I think it seems to be a trend with most organizations now, like the teams are remaining quite lean and they're relying heavily on AI to get more productivity. What's probably the most game changing AI that you've used at Charm?
Speaker 2:So I think it's, you know, across every part of the business process.
Speaker 2:It's kind of been reimagined with AI, to be honest, right, I, you know I mentioned the large language models that we've customized for brand classifications and for score modeling to, you know, determine how well every brand is doing. That's all powered by large language models that we've tweaked to you know, our own requirements for our customers' needs Within our own operations. Everything from you know how we research about customers before we meet with them. That's all done, you know, via AI tools. Now, how we, you know, automate content and lead generation at scale is all done through tools like, as I mentioned, clay and and outreach and everything, and we've built a whole kind of GTM engineering function around that. I just think it allows you to be a lot more efficient and effective, especially if you invest the time up front. I definitely think that there's like a misconception that you could just like turn on AI and it's going to start working. It's definitely a steep learning curve to get everything set up the right way, but we've seen pretty great results so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. It's not just turning it on, I was actually going to ask as it becomes more embedded into charm.
Speaker 2:Are you finding you have to do regular training for your team and stuff like that? One thing that we've done is in our standups we ask everyone to kind of share periodically on where they saw a kind of an unlock using AI personally in the last week with work they've done and that's been pretty interesting to hear. You know different people. You know. I think a lot of it is just encouraging from a top down to get involved, to be curious and get creative with it. You know, on the personal front, like my wife always jokes that ChatGPT is like her second husband. We have a recent, our firstborn was born recently and she's always asking ChatGPT around questions about what's happening with the baby and what to do in certain situations, and so it's like a running joke here. But I really think it's about just diving in headfirst and, you know, trying to adapt it to different situations you have and figure out where it's going to be most valuable for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that idea actually encouraging the team to come forward with ideas and you know everyone else can hear them and be open to them. I might steal that.
Speaker 2:You're welcome to.
Speaker 1:Okay, coming back to social platforms and data that you're seeing at the moment, you know thinking about launching, you know thinking do I get on Instagram, do I get on TikTok? What's the data telling you Like, what are the good platforms that you're seeing are really launching some brands forward?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, about a year ago we saw a trend starting to emerge where a lot of sales were starting to happen on TikTok shop and we released that as a second platform that we provide visibility into for our customers. So we now provide daily sales data on every product sold and every video driving those sales, and the volumes are just unbelievable. I mean, TikTok shop launched in the US at the end of 2023. And in its first full year, 2024, it did 7.3 billion in.
Speaker 2:GMV and worldwide it did about 27 billion in GMV and just to give you some context for you know comparison, it took Amazon about 15 years to get to the scale that took TikTok shop about 24 months to get to. So it's just unbelievable how much traction it's gotten and it makes a lot of sense because there's this incredible authenticity that comes with that platform and you know we're getting incredible feedback from every type of brand that we speak to that's either already launched or is, you know, figuring out their strategy as soon as possible for launching on TikTok shop because they just see it as a clear opportunity to generate not just sales but also awareness and generate a halo effect to drive sales across their other channels.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, those numbers are amazing. I can't believe. I just heard that. Do you think TikTok is disrupting traditional retail? Do they have to be worried?
Speaker 2:I think it's honestly pretty creative. I don't think it's a zero-sum game, I think it's. You know, tiktok is particularly unique in that it's very much an awareness channel on top of a direct sales channel. So, yeah, sure, maybe some of those first purchases are moving to TikTok shop. That would have maybe otherwise happened on Amazon or some other retail channel. But you know, we've seen a lot of data that shows when a brand starts selling on TikTok shop, they see lift in their retail sales of upwards of 10%, and so it's really generating that halo effect by bringing awareness to consumers about brands and about new products and new launches and all of that. And I think it's just a very effective platform for getting distributed awareness and really scale in a very quick and efficient way. Awareness and really scale in a very quick and efficient way. I also think that TikTok is quite unique in that when you look at other platforms, especially in the US, no one's really cracked this social shopping experience in the way that TikTok has.
Speaker 1:How have they cracked it Like how is it different?
Speaker 2:So I think you know, when you look at some of these other platforms that have tried to, you know, imitate TikTok success, they've always started as an e-com platform that introduced the social component after the fact. Right, it's like the objective of the platform is to sell stuff and we're going to make it social and fun. With TikTok, they took kind of this opposite approach where, first and foremost, it was always about the social platform, the engagement. You know, following creators that you're excited about, that you want to watch their content, and then it just so happens that you can also buy stuff there, and so it's more of this organic, weaved in experience, rather than being a core component of what the offering is.
Speaker 2:And I think consumers want to be sold to but don't want to be sold to right, like they don't want to know that they're being sold to in a way. And that's, I think, kind of the beauty of TikTok shop and why it works so well. Is that just this authenticity that comes with? You know you're following a creator and one second you're watching her. You know, take her kids to soccer practice and laughing about something in the car, and the next second she's selling you like a curling iron for her hair and you're like what just happened? I happened, I'd bought, you know, two of them, I don't know like it's. It's like it's all such like a seamless flow of of entertainment and shopping in one that I think just works really well yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Um, I mean coming back a little bit to content and AI. You know, as you now can use AI to make these kinds of videos, like I think soon enough people won't know if that influencer that they just watched taking her kids to soccer practice is actually a real human or completely made up by AI. Where do you kind of see the content going with some of these channels and are you concerned about anything?
Speaker 2:you know it's a really um, good question. I think a part of me is a little bit concerned. I've been seeing some of these spoof videos that they've made of like the president, trump talking, or different politicians talking, and, and it was done by AI and it looks so real like you couldn't tell it apart unless it just had a disclaimer in the video, right, and you could see that being really manipulated and used in bad ways at scale. So it's definitely a little bit concerning. But I think whenever you have a major technological advancement, with that comes policies and best practices and you know, a lot of infrastructure around it to ensure that things are safe and people you know act the right way for the most part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most, yeah, yeah. No, it's really interesting because, like you said, I think tiktok is doing well because it has more of that authenticity element, but with content headed that way, I think it'll be harder and harder to find that authenticity and I think it's going to become more valuable as well yeah, totally, I think that's a great point since we're in the future. Um, what excites you the most about the future of retail ai sas like what. What do you look forward to in the future?
Speaker 2:so I, you know, I think that um ai especially, but any you know, all these new technologies are really just unlocking a lot more customer value. You know, I think that consumers have a tremendous ability to choose more easily than they ever had before. You know, amazon was a big step in that direction, where you have access to millions of products and they can show up to your house the next day, and I think that's just continuing to expand in new ways for consumers right across different categories and verticals. Within beauty, there's all these virtual try-on technologies. Now they have them in apparel and home goods as well, and I just think that that type of consumer experience is getting deeper and brands are leaning into technology more to just provide a best in class service, and I think that ultimately it's leading to quality winning over you know other attributes, and I think that's really important for the long term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right. I think the customer experience has a lot of potential to get much more personalized, much more better, and I think people are going to expect to see that as well. So the brands that can't keep up, you know, with that, I think, will really struggle.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. I mean I was reading something about how I think Meta is going to now be offering to do customized ads for the end user that's seeing the ad. So you could just take a product and then they're going to be. On the other hand, it's like pretty impressive because if there are certain benefits of a product that I would care about more than the benefits most often advertiser that would appeal to you, for example, then that is what should be marketed to me. For it to potentially be a fit Right, it's still up to me if I want to buy it or not. So it's just very cool. It's another example of this customized approach that companies are taking.
Speaker 1:That's really fascinating, and they definitely have the data to be able to personalize as well. I mean, you could almost just put an ad up in my Facebook saying hey, Joanna, here's this microphone you were thinking about buying. Yeah, exactly, exactly exactly yeah, I know a lot of people get freaked out by that. They're like, oh my god, they're following me, they're listening to me, I'm like, I kind of like getting delivered relevant messages.
Speaker 1:You know much better yeah yeah, um, if I could just ask about some hiring challenges as well, because you know, you know a lot of sass founders and marketers listening to this podcast right now. We've touched on AI, we've touched on scaling, we've touched on go-to-market strategies. You mentioned you have a pretty lean team, but what are maybe some qualities that you look for in a candidate when you're hiring?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So look, I think that and it's funny this topic came up recently in an internal discussion I think that there's this kind of intangible quality in a really good startup employee and a startup team be able to micromanage everyone and to be able to tell someone look, here's exactly what you're going to do every day for the next five days.
Speaker 2:The opportunities where they can make an impact and are constantly looking for how they can, you know, make the sum of the parts greater by driving impact and bringing everyone you know to the next level, and so that's really important. And the other big, I think, learning I have is to not rush to hire, you know, a senior sales leader. That's, I think, a big mistake a lot of startups make is jumping the gun and saying you know, I need someone senior to run sales or to be a commercial leader short term, speaking to customers, getting an understanding of what is resonating and what isn't resonating, and driving that as communication then through the entire organization to product decisions, to marketing decisions, to everything right. So I think those are kind of two big takeaways I've had.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think you know, for a founder and a CEO, I think some time needs to be spent in the trenches, like dealing with the different problems that each team has. Otherwise you kind of don't know what you're you're leading with and you know what problems you're helping solve absolutely absolutely alex, my last question for you. If you could go back in time and give yourself one bit of advice, what would that be?
Speaker 2:If I could go far enough back, it'd probably be to buy Bitcoin or something like that. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Aside from that, that's a tough question, Look, you know, I think that it's to take bigger risks faster. I think you know everyone's kind of used to following a playbook and especially if you've come like my last company was over a thousand employees Things were a lot more structured, a lot more, you know, organized and everyone kind of had like a set function and role. And I think it's really important to just take bets right To every day, kind of think about what is something that can drive a 10x impact today and, even if it's a gamble, try it and learn from it and keep improving and just not be afraid to really take those risks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Don't be afraid to fail, just go for it, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amazing. Thank you that.
Speaker 1:Don't be afraid to fail, just go for it. Right yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Joanna.
