Understory Unfiltered: Nico’s Story: SaaS, Innovation, and Default

TLDR: From college dropout to unified go-to-market platform

Nico, founder and CEO of Default, dropped out of college after a call with Justin Kan where he realized the downside was "moving back with parents for a few months" while the upside was "undefined and infinite." His company emerged from a contrarian thesis: single-product SaaS businesses face compounding distribution inefficiencies, and winners will be multi-product companies with higher LTVs who can afford higher customer acquisition costs.

Listen to this episode to learn why most SaaS teams never define their ICP anywhere in their go-to-market stack, how Default eliminates the tool sprawl creating vicious cycles of software overhead, and the unexpected "side quest" where a customer solved CPQ-to-Salesforce integration using Default's AI workflows.

Meet the guest: Nico, Default's founder and CEO

Nico is the founder and CEO of Default, a unified platform that eliminates the data silos plaguing SaaS go-to-market teams. His path from Argentina to rural Kentucky to San Francisco shaped a contrarian approach to building software companies.

Before Default, Nico and his co-founder Victor built their first company together: accounting and billing software for parking companies. That "Hello World" experience taught them how to build and sell software on hard mode. Now Default serves customers who need to eliminate the fragmentation between scheduling, enrichment, routing, and CRM systems that creates coordination overhead for growth teams.

Chapters

[00:53] From Argentina to Kentucky to Silicon Valley: How Nico's unconventional path shaped Default's contrarian approach

[08:11] Default's founding thesis: Why single-product SaaS companies face inevitable distribution death

[16:50] What Default actually solves: How inbound funnel chaos becomes unified workflow architecture

[23:25] Customer "holy shit" moments: When Default eliminates manual reconciliation and solves unexpected CPQ problems

[25:27] Why intellectual honesty beats proving you're right: Ignoring conventional wisdom in SaaS

[28:52] The reinvention moment: Why smart founders take bigger swings and embrace chaos

Key Insights

Dropping out becomes a rational decision when you reframe the risk calculation correctly.

"Dropping out, really a loss aversion thing, right?" Nico explains. His conversation with Justin Kan crystallized the math: worst case meant moving back with parents and completing 10-14 credit hours. The upside was "undefined and infinite."

SaaS growth leaders face similar calculations when considering major strategic pivots. The actual downside is usually smaller than perceived, while not taking action means missing unlimited upside exposure. The question isn't whether you can afford the risk, but whether you can afford not to expose yourself to the potential upside.

Single-product SaaS companies face compounding distribution inefficiencies that multi-product platforms navigate more effectively.

Default's founding thesis predicted that single-product software businesses would face "really big compounding distribution inefficiencies." Customer acquisition costs rise while every easy software problem gets picked over by multiple vendors selling identical solutions.

"If you're multi-product, you have multiple things that you can sell to one customer. As a result of that, you have a much higher LTV," Nico explains. This insight explains why platforms like HubSpot continue expanding product lines. Multi-product companies can afford acquisition costs that eliminate single-product competitors from the market entirely.

Most SaaS teams never encode their ICP definitions into their actual go-to-market stack.

"There's no ICP, you don't define your ICP anywhere in your go-to-market stack. It usually lives in a Google Doc," Nico observes. Despite canonical qualification playbooks and ICP frameworks, most systems remain unaware of these business logic primitives.

This disconnect creates massive inefficiencies. Sales teams manually qualify leads using criteria that aren't encoded in their tools. Marketing teams can't automatically route high-value prospects. For SaaS growth leaders coordinating paid media and GTM engineering, the lesson is clear: strategy only matters if systems can execute it automatically.

Inbound funnel fragmentation costs SaaS teams qualified opportunities the moment demand starts flowing.

"You start spending money on ads and content and then your inbounds start trickling up," Nico explains. This creates sensitivity to dropped leads and pressure to convert every qualified form submission. But most teams use fragmented tools that create data silos and manual handoffs.

As we discuss in the episode, this pain point resonates with what we see at Understory. We generate qualified leads for clients through coordinated paid media campaigns, and many don't have a clear way to act on them. Default customers typically start by connecting website forms to rep calendars with intelligent routing. The broader lesson: inbound success requires treating demand capture as a product, not a collection of loosely connected tools.

Unexpected use cases reveal platform potential beyond core functionality.

One customer came for inbound scheduling but solved CPQ integration challenges as a "side quest." They connected their CPQ system to Default and used AI prompts to transform custom properties into Salesforce-compatible strings, solving a revenue recognition problem.

"We solved a really big rev-rec problem for them via Default workflows," Nico shares. This pattern shows how platforms create unexpected value through combinatorial innovation. The best platforms enable customers to solve problems the founders never anticipated, creating unique competitive advantages for each customer.

Software tool management creates vicious cycles that demand even more software.

"All these data silos and all this administrative overhead would just create even more demand for software and data. It was a self-fulfilling vicious cycle, buying tools to solve problems while more tools just create more problems," Nico explains.

This mirrors the coordination overhead we see with SaaS growth teams managing separate specialists. Revenue operations teams spend most of their time managing tool relationships rather than optimizing growth. They chain together scheduling, enrichment, CRM, and sequencing platforms with webhooks and Zapier, then need reporting tools to understand combined performance.

At Understory, we built our GTM engineering practice specifically to eliminate this fragmentation, using Clay to unify data flows rather than adding another disconnected tool to the stack.

Intellectual honesty beats proving you're right when building software companies.

"Our job is not to prove that we're right. It's to be right and get to the right answer," Nico explains. This philosophy drives Default's willingness to ignore conventional wisdom and adapt quickly when market feedback contradicts internal assumptions.

For SaaS founders, this mindset separates successful pivots from stubborn failures. The best companies optimize for learning speed rather than being right initially. Teams that admit mistakes and change direction based on customer evidence outperform those attached to proving original hypotheses.

The current market moment rewards bigger swings and embracing chaos.

Nico observes that smart founders are questioning everything: "Everyone I know who's really smart is figuring out how they can reinvent themselves and maximize the upside." Conventional wisdom about business models and market attractiveness is changing rapidly.

As we explore in the episode, we're seeing this play out across B2B SaaS. Companies like Clueli are taking massive creative swings with content that would have seemed reckless two years ago, and it's paying off. Services businesses, previously considered "radioactive," now provide competitive advantages for AI companies.

At Understory, we encourage clients to evaluate whether their strategies reflect current market realities or outdated assumptions. Companies that embrace calculated big swings capture disproportionate value during market transitions.

Want deeper insight on building unified go-to-market architecture? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more conversations with SaaS founders navigating growth challenges.

Ready to eliminate the tool sprawl fragmenting your inbound funnel? Book a call with Understory to explore how coordinated paid media and GTM engineering can replace specialist coordination overhead.