Ep. 18: CADTALK Visits the SaaS Academy Marketing Intensive

Live from SaaS Academy: Fire Breathing, CADTALK's Origin Story, and Thinking Bigger
The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — with Jeff Bickler, Scott Bickler (CADTALK), and John Thomas (CADTALK Marketing Manager)

John: You may not be able to tell if you're watching this on video, but for this edition of The Integrate Intelligently Podcast, we're actually all sitting together — John Thomas, marketing manager here at CADTALK, Scott Bickler, our CEO, and Jeff Bickler, our COO. We're all here in downtown Chicago at the Renaissance Hotel for the SaaStr Academy Marketing Intensive — first time we've done one of these fully in person. Pretty exciting to all be together. Thanks for joining, guys. You two have been here for the SaaS Academy Boardroom event throughout the week — what have you been up to in Chicago?

Experiences at SaaS Academy
Scott: We actually flew in last Wednesday — we're recording this on a Monday, so we've been here since Wednesday for the Boardroom event. That's a smaller, invite-only track once you hit a certain revenue level within SaaS Academy — we were able to join this year for the first time. It's a smaller group of founders, focused more on mindset than tactics — less "here's a growth hack," more strategy and how leaders should actually be thinking and operating. We spent the weekend here too, had a great time, and now we're back at it. I think I've been traveling since last Sunday — eighth day in a row now. It's been an amazing stretch, though it genuinely feels like a month's worth of activity has been packed into the last seven days.

Jeff: Same for me — I drove up from Cincinnati last Wednesday evening for the Boardroom, then we had all-day events Thursday and Friday, evenings included. We spent the weekend here with some friends and vendors, did some activities around Chicago, some meals — really got to enjoy the city over the weekend. Last night was the welcome reception for the SaaS Academy Intensive itself, and this morning kicks off the Marketing Intensive with John, our marketing manager, and Scott — excited to see what's new on the marketing strategy side.

John: I'll admit I'm a little jealous about missing a Bulls game — I actually checked the schedule before flying in to see if there'd be anything tonight, but the Bulls and Blackhawks are both on the road. Might have to settle for a trip to Wrigley Field just to say I did something sports-related while I'm here.

Fire Breathing Adventure
John: Before we get into the main part of the episode — I need to hear about this. I got a video from Jeff Thursday evening of him apparently washing his hands with fire, and then I arrive last night and all I hear about is Scott breathing fire. What on earth happened?

Scott: Every SaaS Academy Boardroom event includes an unknown, secret afternoon activity. In past years, apparently, they've done things like rappelling off a building — the whole point is pushing you outside your comfort zone. This year, they told us we were heading out on a mystery "field trip," loaded us onto a bus, and dropped us off still technically within the city, but well outside the touristy areas — at what looked like a warehouse, almost a large open garage space, honestly a little like a fenced-in compound. We walk in, and there are two women doing full vaudeville-style fire performance — spinning fire, breathing fire out of their mouths, putting flame directly in their mouths with real technique behind it. They hadn't told us in advance what the "learning adventure" actually was — turns out, it was learning to eat and breathe fire ourselves.

We spent the next several hours actually learning the technique — taking a lit torch, essentially "eating" the fire safely with your hands, and then, for the brave, actually breathing it — the classic movie image, holding the torch, aspirating fuel, and producing a huge fireball.

Jeff: That's the one you saw from me, John — playing with fire in my hands, literally rubbing the flame around so your hands look like they're on fire. Genuinely an amazing experience — something you'd never expect to just casually learn how to do, and yet within a few hours, you actually pick it up and can perform it. It really breaks down some mental barriers around what you assume you're capable of.

Scott: What was interesting was that this is already a pretty adventurous crowd — entrepreneurs and company leaders, 30 or 40 of us there — and when the performer asked if anyone wanted to try the genuinely dangerous version, about 12 hands shot up before she'd even finished the sentence. I remember thinking, "yep, these are my people." About 12 of us actually went ahead and breathed fire, which is apparently a lot more dangerous and a lot easier to mess up than the hand version — but nobody got hurt, and we had a great time. Made for some incredible photos and slow-motion video, which we'll definitely include here. It really opens your mind to what's possible in a short window of time — your instincts scream "don't do this," but realistically, it's far less dangerous than a lot of things we do without thinking twice, like putting millions of dollars on the line starting a company.

Understanding SaaS Academy and Its Value
John: We've talked a lot about SaaS Academy already — SaaS standing for Software as a Service, for anyone finding us for the first time. We'll get into what CADTALK actually does shortly, but first, Scott, how did you originally get plugged into SaaS Academy? How did we end up here in Chicago today?

Scott: Jeff and I have talked about this before — one of our core values at CADTALK is Relentless Reinvention, essentially our value around continuous improvement. We're always seeking out knowledge, trying to find a better way to operate, listening to podcasts, learning pretty much constantly — anything around time management or running a business better genuinely interests me. There was a podcast I used to listen to from Rob Walling, who created MicroConf for small software founders, and he did an interview with Dan Martell about his book, Buy Back Your Time. That interview was genuinely intriguing — I remember exactly where I was, driving my daughter to a sports nutrition appointment, had an hour to kill, and listened to the whole thing. I thought, "this guy's interesting, let me read the book" — and it ended up being one of the few books I've ever gone back and re-listened to three or four times, which almost never happens for me.

From there I learned Dan had started SaaS Academy, looked into it, talked to them, and realized it was a strong fit — B2B specific, with a revenue-level requirement, unlike some other programs I'd looked at that just weren't quite the right match for us. Went to our first event in June 2023, in Boston, and genuinely fell in love with the community — such an amazing group of people, a lot of fun, and I really started getting to know everyone. I've always been a fairly shy guy, honestly — developer, engineer by background — and this community genuinely opened me up socially. As an entrepreneur, it can be surprisingly hard to have certain conversations with people outside that world — most people back home work more traditional corporate jobs, and being a founder is just a different experience. I was also part of Entrepreneurs' Organization, which was great for similar reasons — but being in a room specifically with people in roughly the same industry, facing the same challenges, playing the same game we're playing, and genuinely able to help each other — that's been an incredible amount of fun.

Explaining CADTALK's Services
John: We get this question constantly when people see the name CADTALK — "what do you actually do?" It's a pretty common icebreaker, especially at a networking event like we had last night. Some businesses are easy to explain in one sentence; I think ours is a bit more niche and harder to summarize quickly. We've done full episodes just on this — but for anyone joining for the first time, if someone walked up to either of you last night and asked what you do, how would you answer?

Scott: They actually teach you this here — developing a real elevator pitch is part of the program. Mine is: "I'm Scott Bickler, CADTALK — we help manufacturing companies get their engineering and manufacturing software talking to each other." That's the core line I use, and it usually prompts more questions, which is exactly the point — but that's the essential core of what we do.

Jeff: I phrase it a bit differently depending on the audience — something like "we help manufacturing companies accelerate the handoff from engineering to manufacturing," or "we get engineering and ERP systems talking to each other." Coming from a teaching background, I tend to boil it down further: manufacturing companies that design physical products — machinery, heavy equipment — use one tool to actually design the product, and a separate tool, the ERP, to manufacture it. Those two systems don't talk to each other natively — they're completely separate — but you need information to move from one to the other, transformed correctly along the way. That's what we do. Some people already have context on what an ERP is, or what CAD is; others have genuinely no exposure to that world at all, so the explanation adjusts depending on the audience.

John: That's a great point — unless you're actually in the industry, none of that context is obvious. This has honestly been a great opportunity for me too, coming from outside the industry, to practice my own version of that elevator pitch.

Scott: The other analogy I like, especially in rooms like this — a lot of people in marketing specifically already know Zapier, for connecting different marketing tools together. I usually say: imagine Zapier, but built for a very specific, niche market. We solve a genuinely niche problem, but Zapier's a pretty good general analogy for the underlying concept — just applied to something much more specific.

John: Good to know — I actually used Zapier as an example myself a couple weeks ago at a trade show in San Antonio, explaining exactly what we do. Glad to hear we're on the same page there.

The Birth of CADTALK: A Personal Journey
John: For anyone learning about us for the first time — this whole company was born out of real personal experience. Given how niche this problem is, what made you even start thinking about solving it in the first place?

Scott: I'm an industrial engineer by training — industrial manufacturing engineering was my actual degree — and the first company I worked for, as an intern or co-op through the University of Cincinnati, made packaging machinery. They were designing something like 3,000 new part numbers a month — building the machines that package things like bottles of Budweiser into cartons — so there was constant engineering change, constant new design work.

What struck me at the time: engineers would print out physical drawings of these parts, and then someone else would have to look at that printed drawing, figure out how it needed to be made, and literally retype all of that same information back into the ERP system by hand — while also layering in manufacturing knowledge that wasn't on the drawing at all: this part needs to go to a router, this one gets cut on a saw, this one runs on a laser. You had to know that as a manufacturing engineer, alongside estimating run times and all the other data needed to calculate cost, routing, and scheduling in the ERP.

It seemed genuinely absurd to me — we started with a fully digital, computer-designed model, printed it out on paper, handed that paper to someone else, who then manually reinterpreted it and retyped it back into a different computer system. Made no sense. This was the late '90s — I started there around December of 1997 — so the seed of the CADTALK idea genuinely goes back that far. I didn't really enjoy that job, honestly, partly because I didn't yet understand manufacturing well enough — you'd get a drawing and think, "I genuinely don't know how to make this," and there was a real learning curve just figuring out how any of it worked. But even then, my instinct was: could we automate a lot of this — or at the very least, semi-automate it?

The Spectrum of Automation in Engineering
Scott: That's something people don't always realize about what we do — we don't always achieve full, complete automation. Sometimes it's genuinely semi-automated, and that's still far better than nothing. Engineers, myself included, tend to think in absolutes — fully automated or not automated at all — but that's just not how it actually works. There's a real spectrum to how integration gets implemented. Automating the parts software genuinely can handle, while still leaving room for a person to apply judgment where needed, is a huge part of what we actually do — probably the part that makes the real difference. We built a genuinely interactive application specifically so an engineer can apply knowledge that simply can't be derived directly from the underlying data. That's really where the whole idea originated.

Embracing a Learning Mindset
John: Jeff, you came into this from a teaching background — how has your appetite for learning shaped how you've approached CADTALK, and being here at SaaS Academy generally? Anyone who meets you can tell that love of learning really comes through.

Jeff: Before this, I was a Latin teacher — I'd nearly finished a PhD before leaving academia, taught for 11 years. I've just always genuinely loved learning — even back in college, I didn't want to leave, because I enjoyed so many different subjects. So coming into CADTALK, walking into a field I knew essentially nothing about, was genuinely exciting rather than intimidating. I got to build real expertise working directly with customers across more than a hundred different projects.

I just really love learning something new and then sharing that knowledge — that's very much the teacher in me. I get a lot of real satisfaction and energy from being able to break something complex down for people and explain it clearly. I was a Latin teacher, which is already a pretty niche specialty, so in a way, this fits — another genuinely niche thing to go deep on, learn thoroughly, and then share. That's part of why I enjoy this so much, and honestly part of why I enjoy learning the other functional sides of running a company too — sales, marketing, product — there's a lot to dig into when you're running a business. This particular Marketing Intensive is going to be a bit different for me than it might be for someone like John, who lives in the marketing details day to day — for me it's more about absorbing the high-level strategic picture, while John's the one who'll really go deep into the sessions.

Reflections on Growth and Validation
John: We'll keep this a fairly short episode since the conference is about to kick off, but I wanted to ask each of you — after your time in the Boardroom, heading into the Marketing Intensive now — what was your biggest single takeaway from the Boardroom, and what are you most looking forward to over the next two days?

Jeff: Mine might sound a little odd — genuine validation. I often feel like I'm behind, not as knowledgeable as I should be — there's that classic curve of expertise people talk about, where when you first learn something, you feel like you know a lot, and then the more you actually learn, the more you realize how much you don't know — the whole "all I know is that I know nothing" idea. Coming from a teaching background, having spent real time learning manufacturing, learning CADTALK deeply, I still often feel like there's so much I don't know — you start noticing every small nuance you still need to learn.

But actually being in the Boardroom, talking with other founders, hearing the speakers, I realized I'm actually further along than I give myself credit for. I'm not nearly as far behind as it can feel day to day. Sure, some of the other founders in the room run much larger businesses — different stage, different point in their growth trajectory — but conceptually, I understood what they were talking about and largely already knew how to approach the same problems. That was genuinely validating — confirmation that we're doing the right things, in the right areas, even though there's obviously always more to learn. It's nice to essentially get graded, in a sense — real feedback from people you respect, confirming "yes, you're doing well, you're making real progress, you're ahead of where you might assume." That kind of validation is honestly a big driver of feeling successful — otherwise you're just guessing whether you're on the right track. Hearing it directly from people you respect really does light a fire and push you to work even harder in the right direction.

Thinking Bigger and Moving Faster
Scott: That's a great point. I think there's real truth to "your tribe becomes your vibe" — or the idea that you become something like the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Being around people who keep raising that average, seeing what's genuinely possible, tends to expand your own thinking and drive real improvement. Being here, especially in the Boardroom specifically, and now heading into these other sessions — my biggest single takeaway is: think bigger, and move faster.

I actually had a birthday a couple weeks ago, and I've been reflecting on how my own goals just keep getting bigger — and honestly, I want to move faster and think bigger about all of it, partly because it's simply more fun approached that way. Being in a room like this is a genuine reminder of what's actually possible when you're surrounded by the right people. The timing of these events tends to line up really well too — often right around when things are getting hard, or grinding along in a rough patch, you get to come to something like this and leave genuinely reinvigorated. So: think bigger, learn as much as you possibly can, and just keep the fight going, doing the best you can.

John: Scott Bickler, Jeff Bickler, John Thomas here on The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — be sure to subscribe on Spotify, and you can watch full video episodes on YouTube. A few other past podcast guests are actually here at the event too — Ponicz from TrustShoring is here, so go check out that episode if you haven't; we've also had Paul Van Voris on, a sales expert, who's here as well — plus plenty of other folks who may end up as future guests. Jeff, Scott, thanks so much for taking the time this morning.

Scott: Thanks for putting this together, John, and for hauling all the gear in your own suitcase — genuinely impressive. I figured I'd leave my dirty laundry upstairs so you two didn't have to see it scattered across the lobby this morning.

John: Thanks again, everyone, for joining and for listening — we're CADTALK Software, you can follow us on LinkedIn, where we post a lot of our content, and give us a follow on YouTube as well. We'll see you soon — probably with an episode that isn't recorded on the road for once, since we've done a lot of these from trade shows and marketing events lately. Stay tuned for more from The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — talk soon.