
The SaaSiest Podcast
200. Fabian Q. Veit, CEO, Make - 15× Revenue, 7× Team, 100K+ Paying Users: Inside Make.com’s Hypergrowth!
AI Summary
In this episode, CEO Fabian Veit discusses scaling Make.com from a modest team to a hypergrowth SaaS with 15× revenue, 400 employees, and over 100,000 paying users, highlighting the shift from enterprise‑sales‑led models to a product‑led growth approach powered by AI‑driven automation. He explains the strategic rebranding from Integromat to Make, the cultural safeguards like Radical Candor and an open AMA Slack channel that sustain trust during rapid expansion, and how AI integration is becoming a smart layer within workflows rather than the sole focus. Veit also shares his perspective on the current AI hype, likening it to an industrial revolution and emphasizing the growing importance of human skills that complement automated systems.
Why It Matters
Make.com’s hypergrowth demonstrates how PLG combined with AI automation can outpace classic enterprise sales, reshaping SaaS scaling economics and setting a new benchmark for automation platforms.
Episode Description
In this episode, we sit down with Fabian Veit, CEO of Make.com, to talk about what it really takes to scale not just one but two hyperscale SaaS companies - first in a classic enterprise sales-led motion, and now in a PLG + AI/automation world.
Fabian shares how Make has 15x’d revenue and grown from ~50 to nearly 400 people, while racing past 100k+ paying customers and aiming for €100M+ ARR, and why that requires a fundamentally different mindset than selling multi-million euro deals into the Fortune 2000. He contrasts the “one deal can make your quarter” reality of enterprise sales with the high-volume, product-first, self-serve motion of Make, where thousands of users sign up every month and the product has to carry the weight.
We also dig into what it means to build in the middle of the AI & agentic wave when your platform is literally how people wire AI into their business processes. Fabian explains why most AI projects are actually 80–90% integrations & automation, where AI is the smart layer inside the flow, not the whole show, and how Make is evolving from classic “if-this-then-that” workflows into visual AI agents that power real operations.
You’ll hear Fabian talk about:
PLG vs Sales-Led: What changed when he went from 9–12 month, high-touch enterprise cycles at Celonis to Make’s “sign up free, upgrade yourself” engine.
Rebuilding While Scaling: Why everything is always breaking in hypergrowth, and how he decides what to fix for 5× future scale, not just today.
Brand & Positioning Pivots: The risky shift from Integromat to Make.com, losing SEO in the short term to win a much bigger global brand in the long term.
Culture at Hyperspeed: How they keep their values intact with hundreds of new hires through explicit values & operating principles, and a brutal honesty policy inspired by Radical Candor.
The AMA Channel: An internal Ask Me Anything Slack channel where anyone can ask leadership anything (even anonymously), and why Fabian believes answering every question publicly is non-negotiable for trust.
We wrap up with Fabian’s view on where we are in the AI hype cycle, why he compares this moment more to the industrial revolution than just another tech fad, and what kinds of human skills will matter even more in an AI-driven world.
Show Notes
200. Fabian Q. Veit, CEO, Make – 15× Revenue, 7× Team, 100K+ Paying Users: Inside Make.com’s Hypergrowth!
Published: 2 hours ago
In this episode we sit down with Fabian Veit, CEO of Make.com, to talk about what it really takes to scale not just one but two hyperscale SaaS companies – first in a classic enterprise‑sales‑led motion, and now in a PLG + AI/automation world.
Fabian shares how Make has 15×‑d revenue and grown from ~50 to nearly 400 people, while racing past 100 k+ paying customers and aiming for €100 M+ ARR. He explains why that requires a fundamentally different mindset than selling multi‑million‑euro deals into the Fortune 2000. He contrasts the “one deal can make your quarter” reality of enterprise sales with the high‑volume, product‑first, self‑serve motion of Make, where thousands of users sign up every month and the product has to carry the weight.
We also dig into what it means to build in the middle of the AI & agentic wave when your platform is literally how people wire AI into their business processes. Fabian explains why most AI projects are actually 80–90 % integrations & automation, where AI is the smart layer inside the flow, not the whole show, and how Make is evolving from classic “if‑this‑then‑that” workflows into visual AI agents that power real operations.
Key topics discussed
-
PLG vs. Sales‑Led: What changed when he moved from 9–12‑month, high‑touch enterprise cycles at Celonis to Make’s “sign up free, upgrade yourself” engine.
-
Rebuilding While Scaling: Why everything is always breaking in hypergrowth, and how he decides what to fix for 5× future scale, not just today.
-
Brand & Positioning Pivots: The risky shift from Integromat to Make.com, losing SEO in the short term to win a much bigger global brand in the long term.
-
Culture at Hyperspeed: How they keep their values intact with hundreds of new hires through explicit values & operating principles, and a brutal honesty policy inspired by Radical Candor.
-
The AMA Channel: An internal “Ask Me Anything” Slack channel where anyone can ask leadership anything (even anonymously), and why Fabian believes answering every question publicly is non‑negotiable for trust.
We wrap up with Fabian’s view on where we are in the AI hype cycle, why he compares this moment more to the Industrial Revolution than just another tech fad, and what kinds of human skills will matter even more in an AI‑driven world.
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