How to keep SaaS customers engaged in the age of AI with Dave Bui @AhaSlides

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by saas.group, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #35 of season 5, Anna Nadeina talks with Dave, founder of AhaSlides, a platform to help you make interactive presentations.

Dave’s background mixes product engineering and entrepreneurship. After founding a Vietnam healthcare platform (sold to a strategic investor), he launched AhaSlides in 2019. Today the company has a team of over 50 and a user base that spans the globe. The original product goal is simple: make meetings and trainings less boring by making it easier to ask and answer questions — and to engage people in the room.

Leadership philosophy and team culture

Dave approaches leadership as an adaptable art. Rather than sticking to a single approach, he emphasises two consistent principles:

• Be agile and adaptable: apply different leadership styles for different situations and people, while keeping clear principles.
• Trust people: assume team members want to do meaningful work. When performance falters, first examine whether leaders set the right goals, structure and one-on-one support.

Practically, that means routines and feedback loops are sacred at AhaSlides. Their product team is split into subteams with shared rhythms: daily standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, knowledge-sharing and tooling improvements. Routines make coordination predictable and give regular opportunities to surface and solve misalignment.

“People genuinely want to be part of a great team and they want to do meaningful work — never lose trust in that.”

How AhaSlides runs a hybrid workplace

AhaSlides chose a hybrid approach with an office in Hanoi. The benefits Dave highlights:

• Shared physical experiences (ping-pong, meals, board games) strengthen belonging and team chemistry.
• On-site collaboration lowers friction for intense, social work and helps the team bond through stressful periods.
• Hybrid work still gives heads-down days at home for focus work.

But hybrid also creates hiring and inclusion challenges. Remote teammates can feel left out when most of the group meets in a room. AhaSlides imposes meeting etiquette to avoid excluding remote participants (e.g., avoid side conversations when someone is remote) and pays close attention to how meetings are run.

Moving up‑market: why sales matter even for product-led growth

Although AhaSlides historically leaned on product-led channels (SEO, ads), Dave explains why adding human sales and go-to-market (GTM) capabilities is necessary for enterprise adoption:

• Accountability: enterprises expect human accountability — demos, SLAs, hand-holding, and someone to own integration and support.
• Organizational navigation: complex purchases involve procurement, IT and multiple stakeholders; human sellers help remove blockers.

Dave’s view is not PLG vs SLG, but both: a solid product plus a human GTM layer where it matters. He also stresses the common trap founders fall into — pushing marketing to paper over a weak product. If the product is poor, no amount of marketing saves it.

Why AhaSlides is expanding globally

AhaSlides’ customers come from many countries. To support enterprise customers and build trust, Dave wants team members in different time zones and markets. Local presence provides cultural context, quicker customer support, and easier enterprise relationships. In short: proximity improves trust.

AI — opportunity, limits and practical adoption

Dave frames AI as a powerful but imperfect tool. Key takeaways from his perspective:

• AI changes product and work: it enables new product features and drastically speeds up certain internal tasks.
• Human in the loop: for high-stakes work you need people for accountability and accuracy.
• Avoid overpromising: early attempts to plaster AI everywhere led to underwhelming outputs and disappointed users.

“AI is a tool — an unskilled user still won’t get good results, and for complex tasks you definitely need people.”

How AhaSlides uses AI today:

• Internal knowledge search and agents that pull decisions, context and reports from internal databases, reducing turnaround for decisions from days to minutes.
• Content polish and draft generation for marketing and documentation.
• Specialised internal agents for specific tasks (Dave warns that giving one agent too much responsibility increases hallucination; splitting tasks across specialised agents works better).
• Product experimentation: should AI be embedded into UI actions, or presented as a chat-first experience that delivers outcomes with less UI friction? AhaSlides is testing multiple approaches.

Data showed that adding an “AI” label does not guarantee adoption — some users lost trust after underperforming features, while others simply prefer manual control.

Product vision for the next 12 months

The mission remains: save the world from boring meetings, one gathering at a time. Practically, Dave wants AhaSlides to:

• Serve both busy users who want a quick AI-assisted workflow and advanced users who need deep control.
• Proactively surface recommendations, next steps and participant feedback so organizers do less manual admin and think more about strategy.
• Deliver reliability and accountability — areas where general-purpose AI still falls short today.

Biggest wins, failures and learnings

Biggest win: the team. Dave is proud of building a team aligned with the product mission and motivated by impact. That alignment makes the product improvements and customer feedback tangible and rewarding.

Biggest failure / regret: not using the COVID-era growth window for longer-term foundational investments. When things were booming, the team made more short-term choices and later realised it would have been strategic to invest in core systems, growth engines and long-term bets while the market was receptive.

Lesson: when times are good, take the chance to make long-term investments you can’t afford during downturns.

Practical growth hacks and founder tips

Dave shares actionable advice for product and growth teams:

• Pick the right ICP and be close to them: deliberately choose the ideal customer profile, then embed them in your product process — invite them to test, observe workflows, and learn their pain points deeply.
• Positioning matters: clarity is essential not only for customers but for AI systems that will crawl your content. Avoid ambiguity about use cases and strengths.
• Embed virality into onboarding: design onboarding so one user naturally brings others — virality built into product flows is the most effective early growth channel.
• Stay fit: mental energy matters. Encourage fitness and hobbies in teams to sustain long-term creativity and resilience.