About Us
Shiv Narayanan, Founder & CEO
Shiv Narayanan is the Founder and CEO of How To SaaS. Shiv's career highlights include:
- Being the CMO / CRO of Wild Apricot from 2014 to 2019 and helping the business grow to $20M in ARR without a sales team.
- Helping Wild Apricot get acquired by Personify and Rubicon Technology Partners in October 2017.
- Being the VP of Products for Personify's 4 product lines (P360, Community, Wild Apricot and a2z)
- Helping acquire and integrate a2z into Personify's portfolio of products and solutions.
- Helping Personify exit their previous PE sponsor Rubicon and get acquired by Pamlico Capital in August 2018.
Beyond his roles at Wild Apricot and Personify, Shiv has:
- Helped hundreds of SaaS and eCommerce companies whose main growth driver is digital marketing.
- Mentored startups from accelerators like 500 Startups, YCombinator, DMZ and OneEleven.
- Worked with PE firms, VCs and Angel investors looking to accelerate demand generation and growth for their portfolio companies.
- Advised the Schulich School of Business and its students in the Executive MBA program
- Helped Humber College craft the curriculum for its Marketing Diploma.
"“Shiv is a smart, talented leader who understands SaaS and digital marketing incredibly well. He brings a unique perspective on how to evaluate a business opportunity, enact plans, measure success and continually adjust for optimal performance. His skill sets range from product management to marketing to overall business operations but that list doesn’t do him justice. He can uniquely evaluate a business and provide actionable plans, continually measure performance and adjust the business plan as appropriate to ensure success.”"
Eric Thurston
CEO, Personify
"It's pretty clear why Shiv is in a CMO position. He knows exactly which questions to ask based on the stage of the business. Through his line of questioning, he's able to identify exactly where the bottlenecks and opportunities are. Once he's helped us identify the 10x opportunities, he has an amazing mental model & framework that allows us to ideate potential solutions --> prioritize --> and ultimately create an actionable plan. Highly recommend."
Wilson Hung
Director of Growth, Kettle & Fire
"Shiv has a unique talent to get right down to the deepest message around a company's value proposition and how to communicate that message in a way that stirs emotions. Combined with his insight into which traction channels are be best used to get in front of the target market, Shiv brings a powerful combination of talent and knowledge to grow a software business."
Keith Holloway
Founder, Envoke
"Shiv is one of the smartest and most genuine people I've had a pleasure of working with and learning from. I've been fortunate to get to pick his brain in our monthly mastermind meetups and his passion and breadth of knowledge in the field of marketing and business is truly impressive and inspiring. Make sure to take a listen to his How to SaaS podcast and you'll see first-hand what I mean."
Srdjan Popovic
CMO, Crossrope
Advisors
Our advisors include industry leading CEOs, executives, investors and practitioners.
Dmitry Buterin
Dmitry is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He was the Founder and CEO of Wild Apricot and helped grow the business to $10M in ARR. He eventually sold the business to Personify in October 2017.
Eric Thurston
Eric is the CEO of Personify and has worked with multiple PE sponsors including Vista, Rubicon and Pamlico. He has also served in leadership roles at Mitratech, P2 Energy Solutions, Oracle and SAP.
Bryce Youngren
Bryce is a Managing Partner of Polaris Growth Fund and focuses on investments in SaaS and technology-enabled services. Bryce currently represents Polaris on the boards of Baxter, Cardlytics, Cityworks, Liaison International and Strata Health.
Dave Shanley
Dave is a serial entrepreneur and technologist. He sold his first company CrowdCompass to Cvent and his second company Notion to Jama Software.
