E38: The Repeatable Launch Strategy with Matt Espinoza and Ryan Kaufman from Clover Labs
In this episode of the SAAS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Matt Espinoza and Ryan Kaufman, the founders of Clover Labs to unpack how they're building a holding company designed to launch and scale multiple SaaS offers in parallel. Clover Labs is a 6 month old, 42 man team that increased MRR by 200K with one Slack message. We talk how they deliver LLM SEO in a fast changing environment, how organic is hard to measure, and the three buckets they anchor on when clients ask “what am I buying?” Matt and Ryan explain why they're starting as a done for you service powered by internal tooling, how Echo fits into the portfolio, and why Reddit is one of the most interesting high intent channels again. They also talk about how Clover Labs is mostly bootstrapped, and why they prioritized exit optionality while building a portfolio instead of one brand with many products. We talk about risk reversals by showing value first, and the challenge of keeping vision and direction clear once you're managing 40 people.
In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talk to Matt and Ryan from Clover about how they built a 42 person, self funded venture studio in six to seven months and turned it profitable fast. They are not building “one big SaaS.” They are building a portfolio of focused companies that all help brands grow. One does SEO, LLM search, and Reddit. Another handles organic short form content. More are coming.
Clover Is A Portfolio, Not A Product
Clover is the holdco. Under it, they spin up companies that each solve one clear growth problem.
Right now that looks like:
- A company focused on inbound SEO, LLM optimization, and Reddit
- A company focused on organic short form content across TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms
They share a core team at Clover. Some marketing, some engineering, leadership, and account strategy. Each sub company has its own offer, its own name, and its own promise.
The goal is simple. Not one billion dollar product. A billion dollar portfolio.
They can start a new company, plug it into the same engine, and cross sell it into customers who already trust them.
One of the new products hit 200k a month in a few days. That came almost entirely from cross selling into the first company’s customer base. No big marketing launch. Just a tight offer and the right message to the right people.
Reddit, SEO, and LLMs As An Actual Channel
Their SEO and Reddit company is not a pure tool. It’s done for your service powered by internal tech.
Clients show up with different goals. Some want more top of funnel impressions. Some want rankings in Google and in LLMs. Others care about overall domain strength for a few key keywords.
The process looks like this:
- Deep dive on the space
- Look at what is already ranking in Google and LLMs
- Look at which Reddit posts and threads are getting picked up
- Map where competitors are already active
Then they design a plan. What to post, where to post, how to show up across search and LLM surfaces.
From our side at Foreplay, we’re a customer. They tick the three big boxes for any service business:
- Ownership. You can set it and forget it. They keep moving.
- Transparency. If something breaks, they tell you before you find it.
- Proof. They show the results for a channel most teams treat as a black box.
Reddit is a good example. It has always been high intent, but almost impossible to scale in a structured way. Now you have Reddit posts showing up in Google and inside tools like ChatGPT. Your customers are asking questions there. So are Fortune 500 CEOs. Clover is one of the few teams treating that entire surface as a real, repeatable channel.
Why A Holding Company Instead Of One Giant SaaS
They could have stacked everything under one logo. Think Atlassian style. One company with a bunch of products inside it.
They chose separate companies under Clover instead. Mostly for flexibility.
A few reasons that came up:
- Exit options
Each company can be sold on its own. Clover can stay as the permanent engine in the background.
- Legal and cash flow
Moving money, ownership, and entities is cleaner when each line of business is its own company.
- Positioning
Each brand can be named and marketed around a specific problem instead of ending up as one bloated “platform” nobody can describe.
- Cross sell leverage
Once you deliver one clear outcome, it’s much easier to introduce a second company with a tight promise than to say “we added another feature to the thing you kind of ignore.”
From a go to market standpoint, I like it a lot. Each company has its own story and hook. Clover reuses the same core systems behind the scenes.
Cross Sell, Consolidation, And Who Actually Does The Work
Jeremiah talks about the hard version. Different products. Different brands. Different teams. Most customers are self-serve and you do not talk to 90 percent of them. In that world, cross selling is slow. It usually happens only when customers ask for something.
Rishabh takes the other side. His point is that cross sell is easier than it looks if you are willing to grind.
His playbook:
- Make account plans for every meaningful customer
- Run daily standups where account managers have to show actual progress
- Turn the second product on for free, show the value, then ask for the card
The key idea is risk. Someone has to take it.
If you ask the customer to imagine the value of the second product, they will delay. If you bring them a live report, a real revenue number, or a working feature that is already helping them, then ask “do you want to keep this,” the friction drops.
Clover sits closer to that side. They have strong relationships and regular communication with clients. That makes it much easier to say “we have another thing that fits this other problem” and have the customer actually listen.
Service Businesses Still Live And Die On Communication
One theme that keeps coming back is how you show your work.
If you run a service, your client cares about two things:
- Are you doing work
- Is that work driving outcomes
You can have one amazing win. One ad. One campaign. One piece of content. If you coast on that for months with no visible effort, at some point the client is going to ask what you are doing all day.
Clover leans into proactive communication:
- Start of week updates
- End of week recaps
- Clear reports that tie work to results
Their internal rule is simple. Always be one step ahead of the client. Do not wait for them to ask “what is going on.” They should never have to dig to see progress.
It sounds obvious. In practice, most agencies and service businesses never do this consistently.
Daily Standups And Pattern Breaks
How you actually get a team to change behavior.
Rishabh talks through why he runs the company on daily standups for both product pods and go to market pods.
The standups:
- Happen in the morning
- Are short and focused
- Cover where they are stuck and where they made progress
By 9 am, decisions are made and the day is free for execution.
The point is not “meetings are great.” The point is pattern break. If you want to change how a team behaves, you have to change how the day feels.
People love routine. If you want them to move up market, think about a new product, or focus on a different segment, you need to disrupt the pattern that made the old behavior feel normal.
Daily standups force that reset. You bring everything back to the surface, every day, until the new way of working becomes the default.
We also talked about:
- The 10-80-10 idea. Ten percent direction at the start, 80 percent leverage in the middle, 10% review at the end.
- Picking one “80- 20 task” per day and actually finishing it end to end.
- Why small daily wins kick off more momentum than one big launch every quarter.
It’s basic, but most teams do not do it.
Ownership And Clarity As The Team Scales
Clover went from 0 to 42 people in under a year. At that size, communication gets harder fast.
Matt talks about how vision has to travel through more layers now. You cannot just tell five people what is happening and assume everyone knows. You need:
- Monthly town halls to repeat the direction
- Weekly or regular team check ins
- Department leads who can carry the message and translate it for their own teams
Ryan sums it up nicely. Every person needs to know two things:
- Where the company is going
- Their part in getting it there
If either one is fuzzy, output drops. So does satisfaction.
The structure at Clover is built around that. Clear direction from the top. Regular touch points. Then room for people to act like owners inside their lane.
Clover is in an interesting spot.
They are not a typical agency. Not a pure SaaS. Not a random holdco that buys anything.
They are using their own exit to self fund a portfolio of targeted growth companies, all backed by one shared internal engine and a very deliberate operating system.
