[SaaS Series] The SaaSpreneur Model Explained With Shaun Clark

​Shaun Clark is the CEO and Co-founder of HighLevel, an all-in-one marketing and CRM platform designed to help agencies and businesses streamline their operations. Before establishing HighLevel in 2018, he founded InvoiceSherpa, a platform focused on automating accounts receivable and invoice payments. Shaun’s entrepreneurial journey is underpinned by his education in Computer Science at Oregon State University and participation in Stanford University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program. Under his leadership, HighLevel has experienced significant growth and was named a finalist for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Southwest Award by Ernst & Young.​

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:22] Shaun Clark discusses the evolution of HighLevel from Facebook lead tools to full-scale CRM
• [05:12] Early struggles selling to SMBs and the surprising agency breakthrough
• [09:35] Transitioning from agency partnership to co-founding with Robin Alex
• [12:57] Bootstrapping HighLevel and achieving profitability early on
• [14:48] Building a 1,600-person team and scaling customer support
• [16:53] A unique Zoom-based support model inspired by Apple and Verizon
• [23:32] Shaun talks about leveraging customer community to fuel innovation and growth
• [27:56] HighLevel’s transparent idea voting system for feature development
• [30:01] The structure and impact of HighLevel’s 40% lifetime affiliate program
• [32:22] Why HighLevel hosts an in-person summit and how it builds connection

In this episode…

Growing a software company is hard enough — but building a community of loyal users, minimizing churn, and scaling support simultaneously? That’s the challenge facing many SaaS founders as they move from startup to sustainable success. So, how do you turn one-time users into long-term advocates while keeping your team and customers happy?

Shaun Clark, a seasoned SaaS entrepreneur, shares how he overcame early failures selling directly to small businesses by shifting focus to the agencies that serve them. He emphasizes solving the nurture gap in marketing with automation and prioritizing customer experience through real-time Zoom support. He explains how leaning into white-labeling, building a transparent feature voting system, and investing in an affiliate program helped create a community-driven ecosystem where clients became evangelists. Shaun’s approach underscores the power of listening deeply, building with user feedback, and scaling with heart.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Shaun Clark, Co-founder and CEO of HighLevel, about building a customer-focused SaaS powerhouse. Shaun shares how a failed go-to-market strategy led to a breakthrough with agencies. He also discusses co-founder dynamics, the SaaSpreneur movement, and using community feedback to guide product development.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Shaun Clark on LinkedIn
• HighLevel

Special Mention(s):

• Robin Alex on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Creating Heart-Centered Experiences With Joey Goone” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Amazon FBA Tips From An Amazon Insider with James Thomson of MarketplaceAccelerator” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Tips to Increase Sales with Chad Rubin Co-Founder of Skubana” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “The best way to help small businesses is to help the people helping small businesses.”
• “You can run an entire business off one feature and do incredibly well with it.”
• “We don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re going to build next.”
• “Without great customer service, the best software in the world doesn’t matter to your customer.”
• “You park your ego, listen to your customer, and amazing things can happen every single time.”

Action Steps:

1. Build customer support around human connection: Offering live Zoom support makes customers feel heard and leads to faster, more effective solutions.
2. Create a transparent feature request system: Letting users vote on features ensures development stays aligned with customer needs and builds trust.
3. Empower users to become affiliates: Offering recurring commissions turns satisfied users into active promoters and loyal brand advocates.
4. Leverage community for growth and support: Creating spaces for peer-to-peer help reduces churn and strengthens user engagement.
5. Focus on outcomes, not just tools: Guiding users toward results helps them succeed and increases long-term product adoption.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Shaun Clark of HighLevel. Before I formally introduce you, Shaun, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top SaaS series I did one with one of the founders of Zapier, Wade Foster. You can check that out.

It is a really interesting interview on how and what they did to grow. Also, one of the founders of Pipedrive, Pipedrive, I think at the time when they were doing 10,000, they had 10,000 customers. Now they have over 100,000 customers. Also, there are someone since Shaun has an amazing, you know, CRM, full service software. They also have a conference a summit, right.

And so part of the conference, one you could check out the one I did with Joey Goone. He creates heart centered experiences. He actually carried on the tradition of utopia experiences. After his mom passed away. I saw all the I was at an EO conference, Shaun.

Like, there’s huge screens and like amazing setup and I went up like, who did this? And Joey’s company actually is behind the scenes doing all the running around the background. So you know, and people can we’re going to pull up Shaun’s summit, which is a HighLevel summit. And maybe Joey, someone you could talk to on that. James Thompson also started Prosper show with Chad Rubin and Johansen.

They ended up growing it and selling it to a publicly traded company, actually. And it’s like for Amazon sellers. So that and many more on inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25.

We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do this in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast. So we’re an easy button for a company to do that. We do the strategy, accountability and kind of the full execution and production.

And number two, we’re an easy button for your companies gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind with clients, partners and prospects simple. Seamless for me, Shaun. I also wanted it to be affordable, you know, so I can send gifts to my staff and clients and partners like a couple times a year for years to come. So we’re kind of like the magic elves that run in the background and make it easy for the company to build more relationships with podcasting and gifting. So you can check out more at rise25.com or email [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce. I mean, Shaun, your name kind of pops into my, you know, whether it’s on social or my inbox at least once a week with HighLevel. So I can’t. Sorry about that. I can’t get away from you.

Shaun Clark: 03:06

So I’m stalking you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:09

Know, I mean, you just have a lot of evangelists, which is an amazing way. And we’re going to talk about that, how you create raving fans. And, you know, Shaun Clark’s the co-founder and CEO of HighLevel, which is a powerful all in one white labeled marketing platform, and it’s designed to help businesses capture, nurture and convert leads effortlessly. And, you know, HighLevel helps businesses automate the communication. They offer tools for lead generation, messaging, payment analytics, scheduling really like pretty much everything I’ve seen, you know, that you can do is what people use HighLevel for.

And you know, what’s interesting is this isn’t his first rodeo, right? He actually founded several other companies before this in the SaaS space, one of which is Invoice Sherpa, which was a platform to help businesses collect overdue invoices, and Shauna’s co-founders were actually named finalists for the Entrepreneur Of The Year Southwest Award by Ernst & Young. So, Shaun, thanks for joining me.

Shaun Clark: 04:11

Hey, thanks. Great to be here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:13

Just, you know, talk about HighLevel and what you do. And as you’re doing that, I am going to pull up your website so people can poke around.

Shaun Clark: 04:22

Well, I mean, it’s funny because that actually has changed quite a bit. So, you know, when we first got started, it was really about helping Facebook marketers go out and convert leads. And these days, we’re now the second largest marketing automation platform in the world, second only to Salesforce. Just recently passed HubSpot in size. And so we’re now a very large sales and marketing CRM, and very quickly going to be moving into the product or project management space in the back half of this year, as we’ve as we’ve pretty much completed almost all the features you could imagine in sales and marketing and CRM.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:58

I want to hear about the evolution, right? Because where you started, I know, is not where you are now. And you mentioned the Facebook market. Talk about where the idea when you started. And then we’ll talk about like what you did as you as you grew.

Shaun Clark: 05:12

And what you added. That has also evolved quite a bit. So when we first started, actually, our mission was to help small businesses grow and we literally were selling into SMBs directly through with two features, two way text messaging and reputation management. And very quickly we found that while that idea was really exciting to them, once they bought the software, their ability to execute on it was very poor and they would come back to us and say, well, we love the software. It has everything you said it would do, but we’re going to have to cancel it because we don’t have the time to actually figure this out or implement in our business this and that.

And it was very confusing to my co-founder and I because of course, we’re two software engineers and you can’t code out any more time. But you also, you know, it was this weird juxtaposition of, well, we want to grow and we get why this tool will help us do that. But we were too busy. We don’t have time. And that was a really funny fork in the road.

And at the time it seemed like kind of the end of the business actually. But we were really fortunate. We had a marketing agency call us and say, hey, you know, we are. We have a customer in common. We’d love to see what you’re doing for them, which at the time was very confusing to us because it was sort of like, why would we want to talk to somebody who’s not a customer of ours?

Right? But what ended up happening here is that it’s ironic that you have Robin on the screen, because that’s who called us. Rob and Alex are now third co-founder, but he ran a marketing agency, and what he really did fundamentally, is teach us that the best way to help small businesses, to help the people, helping small businesses. And so at the time where we got started, there was the big rage was sort of in the marketing space was, you know, run Facebook ads, generate leads, and then, you know, you can sell these leads to all kinds of businesses. But it turns out that there was a big fundamental flaw there.

So while thousands and thousands of people were running around buying Facebook ads, people, what was really missing there is they would run an ad to a landing page or to a lead ad, capture the lead, put it on a spreadsheet, and then hand it over to the customer. And the issue with that was that the customer, you know, was a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer, and they would get sort of like a spreadsheet of leads. And they and they would sort of do nothing with them. And then at the end of the month, they would sort of say, well, why did any of the. Why didn’t any of these people come and buy my stuff or sign up with me or whatever?

And it turns out the missing link was the nurture flow, which really was, hey, you know, you fill out the, the, the, the lead ad and then something someone contacts you and then gets you to kind of take a step most of the time is to book an appointment. And so that’s the gap we filled. So we came in and we automated that flow most mostly through SMS text messaging. That was really our first foray. And what we fundamentally did for those agencies was we radically lowered their churn rates because all of a sudden they weren’t delivering spreadsheets of names, phone numbers and emails.

We were delivering booked appointments, which was radically more useful and important to the businesses they were serving. And that was kind of where we got our start. And then we kind of vertically integrated from there. And that was, you know, six years ago now. It’s amazing.

Time flies. And now we are you know, we grew this out into a full-fledged system again, really serving our customers. I mean, our customers. What we realized initially was, hey, they use all these different pieces of software. Let’s see if we can replace them all in one stack, which we sort of started to do.

And then we watched our customers, as always, teach us new things, which is they said, hey, we’re actually selling this bundled together because it’s always been a white labeled. And I can kind of talk through why that happened, but they started bundling this out and selling it on a monthly recurring basis. And I watched this happen. And really, that was them becoming a SaaS company. And as I talked to them about how that was influencing their businesses, it was radically lowering their churn yet again, and it was giving them a whole another revenue stream they didn’t have before.

And so we eventually just created this model internal to the product and eventually created a whole movement around it called being a SaaSpreneur. And, and that really has taken us kind of on this journey to where we are today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:09

There’s a couple of things I want to unpack here, right? I still want to go on this kind of feature evolution. I do want to talk about the white label piece and also the co-founder piece. Right. So you start with a co-founder and as you just mentioned, you brought on another founder with Robin.

Talk about how that worked, because you could have just probably had like a HighLevel partnership with them and they just used you. So talk about what happened.

Shaun Clark: 09:35

Well, I mean, yeah, it’s pretty extraordinary actually. And you know, I often — I’ll have people often ask me, you know, hey, I want to find a co-founder. Can you help me find one? And the answer is no, I can’t, because the story behind Robin is so. I mean, the story behind both my co-founders are, in my opinion, you know, quite incredible.

And, you know, only took a lifetime to happen, you know. So my first co-founder, Varun, who’s still our CTO today, you know, I met him. I hired him for his first job many years ago in India and at a totally different company. And he was the best software engineer I had ever met. And we kept in touch over many years.

And when I wanted to start HighLevel, I knew that I needed an amazing co-founder. And so I reached out to him and, you know, he was otherwise engaged on a really terrible, crappy idea. To which I told him, you know, look, call me when this thing fails. And, you know, he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t take offense to that. And sure enough, it failed.

And he called me back. So, you know, that was that one. And he was nutty enough to go on the journey with me, of course, which was, you know, at the time, a very crazy idea. And then Robin, for his part, yeah, he cold called us and that was awesome. And he bought it for his agency and this and that.

But he saw the vision behind it. He basically put his agency on autopilot and spent two years flying around the country, introducing me to everybody that he had met over, you know, ten years of being in the marketing space and doing all of it for no money and no equity and no promise of anything. And basically, he got to a point where we were ruined. And I woke up one day and it was so embarrassing that we hadn’t made him a co-founder or gave him equity. That, and we thought how stupid we had been.

But he was just such an amazing human being, and he believed so thoroughly in what we were doing that he didn’t care. And so we, of course, absolutely made him a co-founder and gave him equity and all that stuff. But again, you know, I don’t think you can repeat that performance. I’ve never before or since heard an example of such a committed and altruistic individual. And so I think that’s what makes him so special.

So for me, that’s, that’s how we’ve wound up together. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t have thought of two other human beings that I’d rather run a business with than those two. So it’s a pretty extraordinary. I find myself quite lucky.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:53

Yeah. Shaun, you know, as it’s maybe not repeatable, everyone’s journey is different. But one thing that sticks out to me is you’re always on the lookout for talent, right? And you kind of file that away. So like other people may have, I’m sure there’s other people that worked with Varun and did not really file like, this person’s the best CTO I’ve ever dealt with.

I’m going to do something with them someday. And you filed it away of like note to self. When I do software, I’m bringing this person on. So, you know, whether it was consciously or subconsciously. And I love like Robyn’s probably ethos I don’t know Robyn, but like it’s something I try and work on, which is like just giving to people and not expecting anything in return and just helping.

Especially when you believe in something so much. And that’s, you know, Robyn just like went and just went out to deliver value for, for you and the company. And it was like, it’s like created that opportunity 100%.

Shaun Clark: 12:49

Yeah, that was pretty extraordinary.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:51

When you started, did you bootstrap or did you decide. To raise money? I mean, we’re yeah.

Shaun Clark: 12:57

We’re not we’re not well connected individuals. So yeah, we were bootstrapped and honestly we were actually I mean it probably took six months and all of our savings, but we got to a place where we were profitable fairly early on. So we’ve and we’ve subsequently been profitable the entire time. So we have raised twice, but we’ve raised private equity rounds which are radically different than venture capital rounds. The big difference is private equity invests in larger, more established and profitable companies holistically.

And so in both cases these were minority rounds. So we still control the company. And in both cases, it gave us an opportunity to really pay back our employees because we have had some very long term committed individuals who otherwise bypassed, you know, better, better short term cash paying jobs or other events to go on with us. And, and I felt like in both cases, it was my responsibility to give them some option to do something extraordinary. And these are big, life changing moments for these, for every one of these people, you know, it’s buy their first house or, you know, take that dream vacation or whatever it might be.

So it’s very important to me, given that that option and the private equity rounds kind of served that purpose. Plus we had a great opportunity, honestly. You know, given that neither of us as co-founders have ever run a company this big, it was a really awesome opportunity to connect with people who had and bring them on board and really incentivize them to help us grow. And we’ve gotten really amazing feedback and coaching on, you know, kind of how to do that or how it’s done and learned a lot along the way. So it’s been a win-win.

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