Building something new is rarely a straight line. That's the theme cutting across every industry, business model and market cycle I've looked at, and it's the one founders are least prepared for.

On a recent episode of the SaaS Stories podcast, I spoke with Sam Zammit, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Karmo, about his own unconventional route into the job. What came out of it wasn't a biography. It was a set of practical lessons for anyone working through the uncertainty of SaaS, B2B or startup life — whether you're building software, running operations, or rethinking customer experience inside a mature industry.

Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Sam Zammit

1. Non-linear journeys are the norm

The myth of the perfectly planned career is one founders should drop early. Sam's path ran from the military to consulting to technology and mobility, which reflects something most of us discover eventually: opportunities appear where curiosity and capability intersect.

Treat varied experience as an asset rather than an explanation you have to give. Cross-disciplinary backgrounds produce genuinely different problem-solving. If you've managed logistics under pressure, run lean teams, or balanced operational and product priorities at once, you're better equipped for startup uncertainty than your CV suggests.

The point isn't to chase randomness. It's to accept your growth won't look like a ladder, and that carrying core skills across environments is what sharpens your judgement when conditions change.

2. Stay in love with the problem

The strongest idea in the conversation was about focus. In fast-moving businesses it's easy to get pulled into funding pressure, operational fires and opportunities that look better than the one you're on. The ventures that endure are the ones where leadership stays obsessively committed to the central customer pain.

Sam described the long stretches of slow progress that precede any noticeable growth curve, and the pull to pivot early or dilute focus during them. Adjust tactics as much as you need. Keep the core vision fixed.

For marketers, that means re-anchoring campaigns to the problem your product solves rather than the features you shipped last quarter.

3. Grit outlasts glamour

Business coverage starts at the tipping point — the growth curve, the funding round, the breakthrough — and skips the multi-year grind that made it possible.

Sam's example of a peer who ground for four years before seeing traction is a useful corrective. That persistence wasn't blind, either. It was informed by deep market understanding, continuous feedback and small wins that accumulated.

For teams, grit means operational discipline during the unglamorous phase. Clear priorities, consistent communication and a focus on execution are what keep momentum alive while you wait for anything external to show up.

4. Educate the market, don't just sell to it

Karmo operates in car subscription, a category most Australians still don't have a mental model for. In that position, marketing isn't lead generation. It's category creation.

The same applies to any SaaS product in an emerging niche. Your campaigns have to do two jobs — explain the category, then position you as the leader inside it. For Karmo that means clarifying how subscription differs from leasing, rental and ownership, and why it suits how people's priorities have shifted. In SaaS it usually means breaking down a legacy workflow and showing a fundamentally better way to work.

5. Localisation is a competitive advantage

Karmo is headquartered in Brisbane and runs tailored campaigns with operational staff embedded in every major Australian city it serves. That's a deliberate cost, and it buys relevance.

For SaaS businesses expanding across geographies or sectors, the equivalent might be as simple as changing the examples and terminology in your ads, or as involved as adapting onboarding and support to local norms. The goal doesn't change: make the solution feel responsive rather than generic.

6. Build teams like products

The most transferable leadership idea Sam offered was to treat your team as your most important product.

Design roles, responsibilities and culture deliberately. Give people clarity on where you're heading, what success looks like, and what their part in it is. That isn't soft skills — it's the infrastructure for consistent execution when conditions are volatile. In SaaS, where speed matters and resources never stretch far enough, that clarity is the difference between shipping in three weeks and shipping in three months.

7. Be critical about your time

Sam shared advice from a friend who calculated exactly how many working days he had left in his career, and realised each year represented 5% of the total.

Time is non-renewable, and this is bigger than work-life balance. It's about deliberate choices — which customers to pursue, which initiatives to prioritise, where your energy actually goes. Those choices compound, and they'll shape your business more than any single deal or campaign.

Applying this to SaaS and B2B

Strip away the specifics of Karmo's industry and the patterns hold. Diverse experience creates better problem-solvers. Long-term focus on a core problem beats opportunistic pivots. Market education matters as much as conversion in a new category. Localisation builds trust and lifts conversion. Clear leadership keeps teams aligned through chaos. And strategic time allocation compounds across years.

These aren't startup lessons. They're how you run any organisation that intends to scale sustainably.

Start with the time question. It's the one on this list you can answer this week, and it tends to reorganise the others.