# 134 Building a SaaS Company Partner-Led From Day One | Michelle Eatherton & Tye DeGrange

Michelle Eatherton, Chief Business Officer at Liminal, shares how she convinced her co-founder to build the company partner-led from the very first call, before there was even a product. She and Tye dig into why mid-market enterprises are the underserved sweet spot for AI governance tools, and what it really takes to earn a hyperscaler co-sell relationship.

Jordan Bentley, founder of Audio Hook, explains how he built a performance-based podcast advertising model where brands only pay for real outcomes, not impressions. He and Tye talk about why AI made ad production easier (not the strategy), and why geo-based incrementality testing beats promo codes for proving what's actually working.

Michael Gants, founder and CEO of Encore, breaks down how apps can turn unused "streak" and celebration screens into a new revenue stream, without a single ad or paywall. He shares how brands like Disney, Uber, and Apple are paying to reach users in their happiest moments, and why founders should be more afraid of a broken CAC/LTV ratio than of running a monetization experiment.

Brook Schaaf, co-founder of FMTC and author of the new book Affiliate Hypotheses, joins Tye to make the case that affiliate marketing might be the internet's best — and sometimes only — way to monetize the open web. They dig into why walled gardens like Google and Meta get outsized credit for conversions, and why AI search is putting the open web's survival at risk.

Vikram Chalana, CEO and founder of Pictory, joins the show to unpack how his AI video platform went from 50 customers to 5,000 in just 60 days — and why the breakthrough came from changing the market, not the product. He digs into Pictory's State of Video report (AI adoption has no Silicon Valley bias — Florida and Indiana are leading users), the design principles that keep Pictory out of the "timeline" trap of tools like Premiere, and what's next: code-generated, interactive video that could reinvent how content gets made and consumed.

Remy's Danielle Sakher explains how her team balances speed with observability and security as AI coding tools move from novelty to enterprise infrastructure. She shares what it's really like selling an AI builder to security-conscious industries like financial services, plus a wild stat: alpha users have already spent $300K in AI compute.

Darryl Yearwood, who leads partnerships at Apollo, makes the case that a smaller, higher-quality partner roster beats chasing volume every time. He and Tye get into what "not plug-and-play" really means in affiliate marketing and how to build partnerships that actually move revenue.

Avishag Daniely built One Layer's entire marketing and partnerships function from scratch — coming from a background in IDF cyber intelligence. She shares how her military analytical training shaped her approach to B2B GTM, what it takes to build pipeline when no one's heard of your company yet, and why she treats every marketing decision like an intelligence problem.

Affiliate fraud investigator Ben Edelman joins Tye for an emergency episode breaking down the "Phia fiasco" that's rattling the affiliate marketing industry. Edelman, who's spent over 20 years catching affiliate fraud and has collaborated with Tye on forensic cases throughout his career, walks through what makes this case different from the usual stand-down violations that have hit shopping plugins like Honey and Microsoft Edge in the past.

Logan Dunn, Head of E-commerce at Wyze, ran 100 ads at once, cut traffic, and watched conversions go up. In this episode, he breaks down the counterintuitive paid media playbook behind Wyze's D2C growth — including why narrow targeting beats broad reach, how in-house creative unlocks faster iteration, and what most brands get wrong about scaling paid spend.