Practical Founders Podcast

#214: He Stopped Being the Face of the Company Before He Sold It - Heath Adams Sep 18, 2026 01:10:05 Heath Adams is a military veteran in Albuquerque who started posting ethical hacking videos on YouTube under the handle The Cyber Mentor. The videos found a large audience, consulting clients started showing up, and he launched TCM Security as a penetration testing shop. Then he put a course on Udemy in December and it did six figures in its first week. TCM became a training company quickly. By th

#213: She Took on a Growth Equity Partner for the Advice, Not the Money - Lynn Burghardt Sep 11, 2026 01:06:33 Lynn Burghardt is a fifth-generation owner of Burghardt Sporting Goods — the oldest family-owned sporting goods store in the country, founded in 1881. Chipply grew out of that business: after years of hacking together their own tools for team apparel orders, Lynn and two brothers built the software solution the decorated-apparel industry didn't have, funded by a $250,000 angel check from their fat

#212: The Practical Case for Payments-Driven SaaS Growth, Not Subscriptions - Jay Majaraj Sep 4, 2026 01:04:55 Jay Maharaj built TeamLinkt in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a place not known for software. He saw the problem while coaching his own kids: the hockey team had a budget for a team communication app, and the soccer team didn't, so he either paid for it himself or went without. He launched the TeamLinkt app in 2018 and its back-office platform in 2020. TeamLinkt now powers more than 3,500 organizations

#211: This Practical Bootstrapper Scaled Up and Became a Serial Acquirer - Ajay Gupta Aug 28, 2026 01:09:19 Ajay Gupta founded Stirista in San Antonio after helping with micro-targeting a presidential campaign. His first product identified people who spoke a second language for multicultural marketing — built from scanned baby-name books, a hundred thousand first names, and 107 sales calls before Dish Network became the first big client at $100,000. Stirista now helps brands find new customers using dat

#210: 4th Time Founder: Solve Distribution First, Write Code After - Vic Levitin Aug 21, 2026 57:46 Vic Levitin is a serial founder who built companies in Israel for two decades before fleeing the war with his young family to the island of Koh Samui, Thailand. His first SaaS company, CrazyLister, grew out of his own e-commerce business where he needed a simple way for eBay sellers to build professional listings without knowing HTML. CrazyLister raised about $700K, then a similar second round, an

#209: Leading from Both Sides of the Table as a PE-Backed SaaS CEO - Steve Oriola Aug 14, 2026 53:24 Steve Oriola isn't the founder of Unbounce — he's the CEO that Crest Rock Partners brought in to run and transform it. A sales-and-marketing software veteran who spent a decade at Constant Contact, and even ran Act! for a spell (ACT! is the product and company I helped grow and run myself 10 years earlier!). Steve joined Unbounce in January 2024 and acquired the Insightly CRM six months later, mer

#208: How AI Rewrote What Active SaaS Buyers Want in 2026 - Mike Lyon Aug 7, 2026 01:13:01 Mike Lyon is the founder and managing director of Vista Point Advisors, a boutique sell-side investment bank he started almost sixteen years ago. A former chemical engineer at Exxon and BP who later joined Citigroup's tech M&A team, he built Vista Point to solve a conflict of interest he watched play out on Wall Street: bankers quietly working both sides of a deal. Vista Point Advisors represents

#207: Former Teacher Built a Market-Leading School Hiring Marketplace - Wayne Cartmel Jul 31, 2026 01:04:05 Wayne Cartmel grew up on a small farm in the Lake District region of northwest England and was selling chickens by the age of four. He trained as a maths teacher in Bedfordshire and could not believe the process he had to go through to apply for jobs — hours of Word-based application forms, one after another. He asked why nobody had digitized it, and then decided to do it himself. Funded by a £5,0

#206: He Sold at $3M ARR and Got a 10X+ Exit to a PE Buyer - Eran Galperin Jul 24, 2026 01:15:59 Eran Galperin is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who had already had one VC-backed marketplace failure when he started Gymdesk. Originally called Martial Arts on Rails, it launched in 2016 as a naive version of what he thought a gym needed. He was training five or six times a week and every gym owner he knew hated the software they used. For four years he couldn't acquire customers, so he took a

#205: Domain Knowledge Is the New Moat, Not Features and Code - Cliff Sentel Jul 17, 2026 01:11:24 Cliff Sentell co-founded Compass Professional Health Services in Dallas in 2005, where he and two partners each put in $20,000 and bought a single server. They started in healthcare price transparency, reverse-engineering the cost of specific procedures on specific plans out of billions of insurance claims. The first idea, selling to consumers, flopped, because frustrated patients wouldn't pay $20

#204: He Sold a Majority, Gave Up Control, and Became Indispensable - Matthew Bullis Jul 10, 2026 01:07:50 Matthew Bullis grew up in a mud-brick hut with no running water on a small island off South Korea, was adopted to the US at 11 speaking no English. After a dot-com near-miss, he took over his brother's struggling concrete-pumping software — down to about $20,000 a year — for 90% of the company. He taught himself to code and rebuilt it from scratch. From 2016, Bullis built RapidWorks into the opera

#203: Every Software Team Should Put AI Agents on the Org Chart - Nick Olsen Jul 3, 2026 01:02:48 Nick Olsen is the Head of AI Innovation at Mainsail Partners, where he works hands-on with 25 scaling vertical SaaS companies helping them adopt AI in engineering and product. Before joining Mainsail, Nick spent 20 years helping build ResMan from a 3-person startup into a scaled software company serving the multifamily property management market. Today, Nick leads a team of engineers who embed dir

#202: Practical Fintech: Surviving Payment Platforms and Big Banks - Paul Hoeper Jun 26, 2026 56:27 Paul Hoeper founded InvoiceASAP after spotting a simple but painful problem in 2009: home service businesses couldn't easily create invoices or collect payments from the field using mobile devices. He started in New Orleans, launched during the earliest days of mobile apps, and built one of the first mobile invoicing products integrated with both Square and Clover. He also suffered through several

#201: Creating a New Category in SaaS for Key Account Managers - Jerry Alderman Jun 19, 2026 01:00:36 Jerry Alderman is the co-founder and CEO of Valkre Solutions, a SaaS platform built specifically for key account managers who oversee the largest and most strategic customers in global B2B companies. After careers in engineering, sales, leadership, entrepreneurship, and customer value consulting, Jerry discovered that key account managers were still managing critical customer relationships with sp

#200: The Biggest Pricing Mistakes That Hurt Growing SaaS Companies - TJ Joosten Jun 12, 2026 58:37 TJ Joosten is the co-founder of RevFixr, a pricing and monetization consultancy that helps SaaS companies improve pricing, packaging, and revenue growth. Before starting RevFixr, TJ spent a decade building and selling software, helping early-stage companies find customers, refine product-market fit, and navigate pricing decisions from small startup deals to multi-million-dollar enterprise contract

#199: Enterprise SaaS Built on Salesforce to a Practical Founder Exit - Rupert Mayer Jun 5, 2026 01:15:15 Rupert Mayer is the founder of IPfolio, a vertical SaaS platform built for corporate intellectual property teams to manage patents, trademarks, renewals, and innovation workflows. Originally from Austria, Rupert stumbled into IP software while helping a patent law firm solve Y2K risks, then moved to Silicon Valley to build a modern cloud-based product on Salesforce for smaller in-house IP teams. I

#198: Protecting the Soul of Your Company, with Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup May 29, 2026 50:31 Eric Ries is the entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, whose work helped software founders validate ideas faster and build companies without making huge bets upfront. After years helping startups, large companies, and governments apply Lean Startup principles, Eric built the Long-Term Stock Exchange and turned his attention to a bigger question: Why do so many successful companies lose thei

#197: Scaled His Niche Vertical SaaS ERP with Growth Equity - Marc Sanderson May 22, 2026 01:15:22 Marc Sanderson is the founder and CEO of INNERGY, but he didn't start as a software founder. After earning his MBA and searching for a company to buy, he and partner Walter Wilkie acquired a small architectural woodworking business in Minnesota in 1997. Running that business revealed a deep operational problem: there was no software built for how custom woodworking shops actually operated. So Marc

#196: Founder Conflict, Burnout, and a Successful SaaS Exit - Blakely Graham May 15, 2026 01:08:19 Blakely Graham co-founded TaskRay, a project management and customer onboarding platform built inside the Salesforce ecosystem. After years working with Salesforce implementations and operations teams, she and co-founder Eric Wu saw a major gap between closing deals and successfully onboarding customers. They bootstrapped the company from a simple Kanban-style workflow app into a growing SaaS busi

#195: Built a Calm, Profitable SaaS—Then Sold It on His Terms - Andy Alsop May 8, 2026 01:08:55 Andy Alsop didn't start The Receptionist—he bought a small iPad-based visitor management app in 2013 for $250K and turned it into a real SaaS business. What began as a simple front-desk check-in tool evolved into a full visitor management system used across offices, schools, and manufacturing sites. Over a decade, Andy grew the company to 5,500 customers across 8,000 locations and more than $7M in

#194: Why Selling Your Company Can Be a Growth Strategy - Sharon Nouh May 1, 2026 01:04:31 Sharon Nouh built ProSpend, a spend management SaaS platform for mid-market companies, after seeing firsthand how broken expense processes were in corporate travel. Starting with an expense tool, focused on her home market in Australia, she bootstrapped the company and landed a global enterprise as her first customer with a simple but powerful product vision. Over 10 years, she expanded ProSpend i

#193: The Real Bottom of the Funnel: SaaS Onboarding That Works - Perry Rosenbloom Apr 24, 2026 01:07:19 Perry Rosenbloom, founder of LaunchBay, previously built and sold Brighter Vision before starting his second SaaS company focused on onboarding. After running hundreds of onboarding processes per month, he saw a consistent problem: what happens after the sale is messy, manual, and often ignored. LaunchBay helps SaaS and professional services teams manage customer onboarding with structured workflo

#192: Built A Vertical SaaS Giant In Aviation Without VC Funding - Dinakara Nagalla Apr 17, 2026 01:04:38 Dina Nagalla built EmpowerMX over more than a decade to digitize aircraft maintenance for major airlines like American, Southwest, and United. Starting from deep domain experience inside aviation IT, he tackled a complex, high-stakes problem—replacing paper-based processes with a full execution system that improves efficiency and compliance. The company grew into a mid–double digit SaaS business

#191: No Investors the 2nd Time - Bootstrapped to a Bigger Exit - Chad Ingram Apr 10, 2026 01:11:41 Chad Ingram is the founder of Distro, an AI recruiting software company that helps mid-market and enterprise companies automate candidate screening, vetting, ranking, and scheduling. He previously built Jump, a venture-backed customer engagement software company, through a stressful growth and sale process that taught him painful lessons about fundraising, control, and acquisition pressure. Dis

#190: Building Faster with AI-Powered Product Demos That Convert - Joseph Lee Apr 3, 2026 01:01:47 Joseph Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Supademo, a fast-growing SaaS company solving a common pain: quickly creating new product demos. In just two and a half years, they built a modern, AI-powered solution that dramatically simplifies how teams showcase software. Supademo has reached $3M ARR in 2.5 years and is growing more than 100% annually with a freemium model. The product enables teams to c

#189: How Lighter Capital Finances Bootstrapped SaaS Growth - Tanner Kovacevich Mar 27, 2026 58:11 Tanner Kovacevich of Lighter Capital joins Greg Head to explain how non-dilutive financing works for practical SaaS founders. Since 2010, Lighter Capital has funded hundreds of recurring-revenue SaaS companies that want growth capital without giving up ownership or board control. Tanner shares discuss how non-dilutive financing fits companies with $1M–$5M ARR that are growing steadily but don't wa

#188: The Practical Long Game: 25 Years Scaling QuestionPro - Vivek Bhaskaran Mar 20, 2026 01:10:12 Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of QuestionPro, a bootstrapped survey and customer-experience research software platform they have been building for more than 25 years. Based in the Bay Area, Vivek has grown the company globally without venture capital, staying deeply involved in product and running the business as both CEO and de-facto chief product officer. As QuestionPro crossed $10M the

#187: Practical Rule of 40 Growth+Profits Still Works for SaaS Acquirers - Juan Ignacio Garcia Braschi Mar 13, 2026 56:41 Juan Ignacio Garcia Braschi is a partner at L40, a boutique SaaS M&A advisory firm with offices in Madrid, Lisbon, and Miami. After two decades in banking, private equity, and operating roles, including serving as CFO of ride-hailing company Cabify, he now helps SaaS founders sell companies typically valued between $20M and $200M. L40 works primarily with B2B SaaS companies doing $5M–$50M ARR, mos

#186: The Grind Behind a Stellar SaaS Exit in the UK - Simon Swords Mar 6, 2026 01:12:41 Simon Swords founded Fundipedia after starting in a backyard shed building bespoke software. Originally a custom development shop, his firm built a data governance platform for major buy-side asset managers including HSBC, Barclays, and Legal & General. Over time, Fundipedia evolved into a high-retention enterprise SaaS platform with strong net revenue retention and Rule of 40 performance. Simon n

#185: Survived COVID and a PE Exit —A Travel Tech Founder's Journey - Steve Reynolds Feb 27, 2026 01:00:16 Steve Reynolds didn't start TripBam to disrupt the global hotel industry—he simply noticed that corporations weren't getting the discounts they negotiated, and no one was checking. After 30 years in travel technology, he saw a broken system hiding in plain sight. What began in 2013 as a consumer hotel re-shopping tool quickly revealed a much bigger enterprise opportunity. When a corporate client o

#184: Fixing The Software Development Mess For Non-Technical Founders - Keith Shields Feb 20, 2026 01:03:53 Keith Shields is co-founder and CEO of Designli, a custom software development company that's helped non-technical founders build over 200 digital products in 13 years. After struggling to build apps through unreliable agencies in his own early startup, Keith focused on fixing the many painful experiences most founders have when hiring software development teams. Designli operates as a complete ou

#183: Selling to the Gorilla: Snap's Strategic Exit to ICE Mortgage Tech - Will Caldwell Feb 13, 2026 52:22 Will Caldwell started Snap after his first real estate software startup fizzled, pivoting from agent tools to regulated compliance data. He discovered lenders were required to buy hazard and flood certifications, and realized this was a "painkiller" product. He built Snap as a data and analytics platform for real estate and mortgage underwriting. Snap grew from a single California compliance produ

#182: Why Focus Beats Funding in Crowded SaaS Markets - Luigi Mallardo Feb 6, 2026 01:02:54 Luigi Mallardo joined Woffu as an early angel investor and later became CRO, helping founder Miguel Fresneda shape a practical SaaS growth path. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Woffu has built a modern cloud-based time and attendance platform for SMEs and mid-market companies, replacing legacy tools and spreadsheets with a focused, mobile-first workforce solution. Starting from just €2K MRR, Luigi led

#181: Why Systems (with AI) Scale Better Than People in SaaS - Jordon Comstock Jan 30, 2026 59:25 Jordon Comstock is founder and CEO of BoomCloud, a vertical SaaS company serving dental practices with patient membership software. He started the company scrappy and bootstrapped, with no outside funding, after years in the dental industry managing his family's dental lab business. BoomCloud now does about $3M in ARR with roughly 600 dental practices and an 11-person team. The company helps denti

#180: AI Is Not Killing Vertical SaaS - It's Practical Leverage - Deepak Sindwani Jan 23, 2026 49:23 Deepak Sindwani is Managing Partner at Wavecrest Growth Partners, an active growth equity firm backing bootstrapped and lightly funded SaaS founders. They work with practical founders who've built profitable businesses to $5–$20M ARR and want help growing without VC pressure or losing control. Wavecrest invests in vertical SaaS companies growing 30–60% annually, typically profitable or breakeven.

#179: Don't Sell Your SaaS Yet: Hire a CEO and Get Your Life Back - Tighe Burke Jan 16, 2026 01:00:27 Tighe Burke is the founder of SRCH Partners, a boutique executive search firm that helps SaaS founders replace themselves as CEO without selling their companies. After years in large executive recruiting firms, Tighe built a practice focused on founders who want their business to keep growing while they step back from day-to-day leadership. Tighe works with profitable software companies typically

#178: Approaching $20 Million ARR with 99% Annual Retention - Dan MacDonald Jan 9, 2026 01:08:21 Dan MacDonald is the founder and CEO of BIS Safety Software, based in Edmonton, Canada. He didn't start in safety or software—he came from retail and leadership training before an unexpected pivot led him into online safety systems. That shift eventually became a long-term bet on a "un-sexy" problem that companies can't ignore. Today, BIS Safety serves more than 2.5 million users across high-risk

#177: Building Multi-product Vertical SaaS With a Tiny Team - Robin Eissler Jan 2, 2026 01:10:50 Robin Eissler is the founder and CEO of BoosterHub, a vertical SaaS platform built for high school booster clubs. After selling her prior business as a private jet broker, Robin volunteered to run a local booster club and discovered a messy problem run with spreadsheets, emails, and manual accounting. She decided to build a single system that could actually handle it. BoosterHub now serves nearly

#176: The Five Questions That Will Decide Your SaaS Progress Next Year - Greg Head Dec 26, 2025 54:01 As the year winds down, I want to share an end-of-year message for practical SaaS founders who want to make better progress in 2026. Based on my recent conversations with more than 40 CEOs in my Practical Founders peer groups, it's clear that growth rates alone don't define whether it was a "good" year. Founders experienced very different outcomes—and very different feelings about them. In this ep

#175: The Hidden Founder Psychology Patterns Behind Stuck SaaS Companies - Dave Hersh Dec 19, 2025 01:06:44 Dave Hersh, co-founder and former CEO of Jive Software, shares the real story behind bootstrapping Jive to $12M in revenue before raising venture capital and scaling aggressively. He explains how fear, comparison, and the pressure to "go big" drove him to abandon his profitable core business and pursue a new upmarket strategy that ultimately cost the company its soul. After growing to $60 million

#174: Plateaus, Pivots, and Staying Profitable: Solving Practical SaaS Puzzles - Josh Ho Dec 12, 2025 01:06:51 Josh Ho is the Founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a bootstrapped referral marketing platform serving SMBs that rely on multi-step, relationship-driven sales. Starting in 2015 as a solo developer consulting on the side, Josh built the first version himself, validated demand quickly, and landed early customers by doing demos and hands-on support. Referral Rock has grown to roughly 500 customers, 20

#173: From COVID Boom to Bootstrap Mode: Hubilo's Refounder Story - Shailesh Hegde Dec 5, 2025 01:08:37 Shailesh Hegde is the CEO of Hubilo, a Bangalore-based webinar software company that initially started during COVID as virtual events tech and raised $150M in VC funding before the market shifted. Originally joining as head of product, he stepped into the CEO role during a chaotic downturn and led the company through a full strategic reset after returning all the remaining capital to investors. W

#172: Why Long-Term Bootstrapping Still Works in Event Mgt. SaaS - Raju Patel Nov 28, 2025 59:31 Raju Patel founded eShow over 25 years ago after building a speaker portal for a magazine company and realizing he had a repeatable software product. What began as a one-man shop in suburban Chicago evolved into a robust event-management platform serving associations that needed complex, multi-module functionality. His business grew steadily as he delivered registration, booth management, speaker

#171: Lessons from a 9-Year Bootstrap Journey to a Private Equity Exit - Dharshan Rangegowda Nov 21, 2025 01:03:56 Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of ScaleGrid, left a decade-long engineering career at Microsoft to solve a painful database operations problem he had lived firsthand. After early missteps selling to enterprises, he shifted to helping developers manage MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres on the cloud, bootstrapping the business from scratch. ScaleGrid grew steadily through product depth, technical support,

#170: Why Most SaaS Acquirers Still Want Profitable Growth in 2025 - Gaurav Bhasin Nov 14, 2025 01:05:00 Gaurav Bhasin is the founder and managing director of Allied Advisers, an M&A advisory firm whose principals have completed over 100 sell-side transactions for software and tech founders. After two decades in investment banking and tech M&A, Gaurav is a sell-side advisor to B2B software founders who have built successful businesses and want to explore selling their companies. Allied Advisers typic

#169: Practical Pivot and Relaunch Created Profitable 200% Growth - Natalie Barbu Nov 7, 2025 01:04:42 Natalie Barbu is the founder and CEO of Rella, a SaaS platform built to streamline collaboration and workflows for social media teams and agencies. She began as a YouTube creator, grew a following of over 300,000, and then identified the fragmentation of the creator tools market — which led her to build Rella 1.0. With some small seed funding, the first Rella version focused on content creators a

#168: These Three Superpowers Set Practical SaaS Founders Apart - Greg Head Oct 31, 2025 52:30 In this episode, the founder of Practical Founders, Greg Head, shares the most powerful insights from over 165 podcast interviews and working with 40+ bootstrapped SaaS founders in his peer groups. Greg breaks down the common but less obvious traits he sees in practical founders who are quietly building valuable software companies without big VC funding. Greg shares how frugality and managed risk-

#167: Practical Founders Brought in CEO to Scale Their Company - Darryl Pahl Oct 24, 2025 01:10:55 Darryl Pahl is the co-founder of DFnet, a Seattle-based company providing clinical trial data management software and services. Along with his wife and co-founder, Lisa Ondrejcek, Darryl started the company more than 20 years ago after careers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. They built DFnet around long-term client relationships in global health and clinical research. The company runs D

#166: How Practical SaaS Founders Can Compete in the AI Economy - Vincent Serpico Oct 17, 2025 58:39 Vincent Serpico, veteran CTO and founder of Founders Workshop, is on the front lines of the AI revolution in 2025, reshaping software development and business operations. With more than 30 years of experience building software apps, Vincent is now dedicating himself full-time to AI coaching and workshops for teams and companies to create high-leverage impact quickly. Vincent shares how practical S

#165: How to Enjoy Being the CEO as Your SaaS Business Grows Bigger - Brett Gilliland Oct 10, 2025 01:01:34 Brett Gilliland, founder of Elite Entrepreneurs, joins Greg to discuss how they help ambitious founders navigate the tough leadership journey from $1M to $10M in revenue. Brett shares how co-creating a clear, practical Purpose, Values, and Mission form the foundation of scalable organizations. He explains why moving from founder-led chaos to aligned leadership teams is the critical step that separ

#164: SaaS Founders Save Millions With Fractional Senior Engineers - Praveen Ghanta Oct 3, 2025 57:28 Praveen Ghanta, founder of Fraction and former CEO of HiddenLevers, shares how he turned his experience scaling a bootstrapped SaaS company into a fast-growing fractional talent marketplace. After HiddenLevers reached $8M in ARR and sold for over $100M, he realized that senior fractional engineers were the secret to delivering efficiently without expensive full-time hires. Fraction now serves over

#163: Anthony Pierri & Rob Kaminski of Fletch: Why All SaaS Founders Struggle with Positioning Sep 26, 2025 01:12:36 Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski are the co-founders of Fletch, a positioning strategy firm for B2B SaaS companies. They started Fletch after observing that most founders often confuse positioning with copywriting and marketing, and built their business by helping SaaS leaders make the tough, strategic choices about who they serve and how they win. Over the last three years, Anthony and Rob have co

#162: Practical Investor - What's Working Now in AI-Driven SaaS Growth - Dave Yuan Sep 19, 2025 01:00:34 Dave Yuan is the founder of Tidemark, an active growth equity investor focusing on vertical SaaS companies with outsized advantages that can become "control points" in their markets and grow very big. Dave and Tidemark have invested in successful vertical software companies like Toast, ServiceTitan, Jane, and CCC. Tidemark hosts its annual VSaaS Collective Live Event, featuring experienced speaker

#161: When Co-Founders Need Relationship Therapy - Dr. Matthew Jones Sep 12, 2025 53:41 Dr. Matthew Jones is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in working with co-founders to help manage critical conflicts that threaten their success. He is the author of the book, "The Cofounder Effect: How to Diagnose, Fix, and Scale Healthy Communication for Startup Success." Matt has worked with hundreds of bootstrapped and VC-funded co-founder teams to help them repair and manage th

#160: CPG Founder Turned Failure Into a Profitable SaaS Business - Yuval Selik Sep 5, 2025 01:08:27 Yuval Selik is co-founder and CEO of Promomash, a software platform and managed service for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands to manage their trade promotions and field marketing activities. Yuval is a former CPG founder who encountered the expensive, complex, and crucial process of managing trade promotions with stores and distributors. Promomash launched in 2015 to serve mid-sized CPG compani

#159: Co-Parenting App Reaches $10M ARR Through Pure Bootstrap Growth - Vince Mayfield Aug 29, 2025 01:04:25 Vince Mayfield is cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents, a co-parenting app for communication and coordination used by divorced parents raising children. Cofounder Stephen Nixon was a lawyer with family cases who recognized the need for a secure, unalterable communication record to improve co-parenting and family harmony. He pitched a development company owned by Vince and Louis Erickson to build t

#158: $33M Growth Equity After Friends/Family Funding to $10M ARR - Alan Miegel Aug 22, 2025 01:11:51 Alan Miegel is co-founder and CEO of BetterComp, a modern compensation management platform for larger companies to manage compensation datasets to set market-priced salary benchmarks. Alan and his cofounders started the company in 2019 with founder funding, then raised angel funding as convertible debt from his friends in the tech industry. They shipped their first "minimum sellable product" in 20

#157: Seven Years In Survival Mode: A VC-funded Founder's Warning - Zvi Band Aug 15, 2025 01:07:12 Zvi Band is co-founder and former CEO of Contactually, which was CRM software for real estate and other relationship-oriented professionals. Contactually was founded in 2011 with initial funding and support from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley. In the next five years, they raised a total of $15.5 million from institutional VC investors. Contactually grew to about $10 million in revenue before growt

#156: Bootstrapper Built Vertical CRM to $10M ARR with Co-founder Dad - Shoanak (Sean) Mallapurkar Aug 8, 2025 01:11:26 Shoanak (Sean) Mallapurkar is the founder and CEO of Recruit CRM, a complete CRM and business management system for global staffing companies and recruiting agencies. He started the company in 2017 with his father, a technical expert who had experience as a senior executive in large staffing companies. Sean handled customer-facing jobs in sales, success, and product management, and his Dad managed

#155: SaaS Founder's Crazy Ride: Boom, Bust, Strategic Sale - Jesse Burrell Aug 1, 2025 01:08:33 Jesse Burrell is the CEO and co-founder of BatchService, now known as BatchData, a real-time data and API platform designed for prop-tech startups and enterprises requiring massive and current housing data. Jesse was a real estate investor who needed better data to target his marketing efforts. BatchService was launched in 2018 with data brokering and subsequently built additional tools and apps.

#154: 2nd-Generation CEO Modernizes Mom's Legacy Software Business - Brian Forbis Jul 25, 2025 01:00:48 Brian Forbis is the CEO and president of Blood Bank Computer Systems, Inc. (BBCS), a business his mother created in the 1980s to serve the non-profit blood bank industry in the US. Brian started in sales, then transitioned to run development, and assumed the role of CEO in 2019 when he bought the company. BBCS rebuilt its entire mission-critical ERP software as a modern cloud solution over the la

#153: Bootstrapper Killed His First Company to Scale Up Bigger - Chris Brisson Jul 18, 2025 01:05:14 Chris Brisson is the CEO and co-founder of Salesmsg, a conversational two-way texting platform that enables businesses to engage with their customers through opt-in SMS. When his first software company stalled, he shut it down and developed the Salesmsg product for a different SMS use case that served his previous customers. Salesmsg now provides secure SMS texting across all departments in the c

#152: Practical SaaS CEO Stays On After 100% Cash Sale - Tracy Larson Jul 11, 2025 01:04:10 Tracy Larson is President and CEO of WeSuite, a vertical sales automation platform designed for larger integrators who sell complete security systems for commercial and residential real estate. Tracy and the cofounders were in the security systems business before launching a sales software company for this market in 2008. WeSuite is now a comprehensive solution that addresses the complex industry

#151: Facial Recognition SaaS for Casinos to Almost $10M in Revenue – Henry Valentino Jul 4, 2025 01:02:52 Henry Valentino is the founder and CEO of EConnect, a leading provider of facial recognition software for casinos and stadiums, ensuring venue security and compliance. He founded EConnect in 2009 and pivoted several times before focusing on a security platform utilizing AI for casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Econnect platform offers facial recognition surveillance software that integrate

#150: Grew an Unsexy Small Software Biz Into a SaaS Powerhouse - Josh Turley Jun 27, 2025 01:16:36 Josh Turley is CEO of RTA Fleet Management, a fleet management software company that his grandfather started in the 1980's and ran as a small family business for decades. Then Josh's father ran the business until 2015, never growing this slow, old-school business past $2 million in revenues. Josh had worked in the business before, but in 2016, Josh bought the business, to over as CEO and slowly be

#149: How Partner-Led Sales Built A $7M Bootstrap SaaS Business - Sameer Narkar Jun 20, 2025 01:03:58 Sameer Narkar is the founder and CEO of Konnect Insights, a global SaaS company based in Mumbai that provides an omnichannel customer experience platform to consumer brands in 100 countries. Sameer created Konnect Insights in 2015 to help customer service teams respond to customers who mention their brands on social media. The product and company have expanded from a slow start working through mar

#148: These Bootstrappers Sold Modern Digital LeadGen to Conservative German Businesses - Chris Erler Jun 13, 2025 55:44 Chris Erler was co-founder and COO of ComX, a sales pipeline generation for mid-market B2B companies in Germany and Europe. Chris and two other founders started the company in 2018 to conduct turnkey modern digital marketing and lead generation solutions for traditional German companies. As a tech-enabled service that combines technology, data, and people-powered solutions, ComX delivers proven re

#147: How a Philadelphia Insurance Agent Built the Uber of Surety Bonds - Aaron Steffey Jun 6, 2025 01:04:44 Aaron Steffey is the co-founder and co-CEO of Propeller, an online platform that enables insurance agents and brokers to issue surety bonds instantly — without the lengthy paperwork or back-and-forth typically involved in bonding. Aaron was an insurance agent, and his co-founder cousin, Chris, was a surety bond underwriter before 2019, when they set out to revolutionize the way surety bonds are bo

#146: This European SaaS Bootstrapper Raised $22M in Growth Equity Without Losing Control - Roy van den Broek May 30, 2025 01:00:46 Roy van den Broek is the founder and CEO of Rentman, a rental business management software platform for event and media production companies. Roy built software for his event equipment rental business in the Netherlands. He had over 100 software customers in Europe before selling his rental equipment company in 2015 to focus on growing his Rentman SaaS company. Rentman grew slowly and profitably

#145: Making Big Bold Bets with Patient Execution as a Bootstrapped Founder - Gopal Krishnamurthy May 23, 2025 59:50 Gopal Krishnamurthy is the founder and CEO of Lumel, which has a suite of products focused on enterprise performance management (EPM). Their apps allow users to plan, report, and analyze data using the modern native app framework vs. traditional SaaS on top of modern cloud data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, and others. Lumel's products provide a full stack of integrate

#144: From Founder-Led Sales to Scalable Go-To-Market in Vertical SaaS - Phil Stern May 16, 2025 58:20 Phil Stern is the operating principal of Mainsail Partners, a growth equity firm that invests in bootstrapped vertical SaaS companies. Mainsail offers deep operating support to the leaders in their portfolio companies to help them grow more efficiently. Phil leads the GTM operations team, helping their founders scale sales, marketing, and success teams. Phil was an experienced SaaS sales leader a

#143: From Professional Services to a $30M SaaS Business with a PE Acquisition - Sean Hoban May 9, 2025 01:04:53 Sean Hoban was co-founder and former CEO of Kimble Applications, a leading professional services automation (PSA) software for organizations to manage their professional services business's entire operational and financial lifecycle. Sean and his co-founders had already started, grown, and sold a pro services organization before creating a PSA product and building a SaaS business. With a little f

#142: Why This 3x SaaS Founder Couldn't Stay Retired to Launch His New Al Startup - Josh LaSov May 2, 2025 58:37 Josh LaSov is the founder and former CEO of Satori Reporting, an advanced reporting and business intelligence (BI) solution for mid-market businesses that use NetSuite financial software. Satori provided pre-built reports and dashboards, a tailored data warehouse, and detailed data models that leveraged the popular Power BI software. Josh launched Satori, his second NetSuite solution, in 2019 and

#141: Inside Acquire.com's Process for Selling Sub-$5M SaaS Companies - Andrew Gazdecki Apr 25, 2025 55:39 Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Acquire.com, a marketplace of buyers and sellers of smaller, profitable SaaS products with revenues between $100,000 and $5,000,000. Andrew sold his own software company and learned how little support and information was available to sell a software product for under $5-10 million in deal size. Acquire.com has helped over 2000 entrepreneurs sell their soft

#140: The Anti-Silicon Valley Playbook: How Genius Monkey Built a $100M Ad Tech Business on Their Own Terms - Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington Apr 18, 2025 01:04:34 Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington are the co-founders of Genius Monkey, a programmatic ad tech platform with proven targeting, tracking, and attribution for optimized results. Seth and Clint were childhood friends who worked on many business ventures before launching Genius Monkey in 2009, leveraging their experience in digital ad technologies. Genius Monkey grew steadily as a bootstrapped company

#139: Bootstrapped Founder is Getting Ready for the AI Wave at $20M ARR - Shalin Jain Apr 11, 2025 01:07:35 Shalin Jain is the founder and CEO of HappyFox, a successful bootstrapped company that provides modern help desk management software for customer service, support, and IT management organizations. Shalin and his small team in India built many successful products from 2000-2010, then focused on HappyFox and moved to the US in 2011. HappyFox is a mid-market product that sells across industries and d

#138: Achieved Strategic Acquisition Just 2 Years After Launch - Brian Kesselman Apr 4, 2025 01:00:15 Brian Kesselman is cofounder and now CRO of Skematic, a compliance management and workflow software for financial services firms. Brian was a lawyer for major financial services companies who helped manage internal compliance in this highly regulated industry. He took a job selling compliance software and broke sales records before starting Skematic with a coworker and launching in September 2022.

#137: Her Amazing Story of 0-$30M ARR with No Outside Funding - Rebecca Shostak Mar 28, 2025 01:04:57 Rebecca Shostak is co-founder and chief brand officer of Flodesk, the popular email marketing software for small businesses that care about beautiful branded emails. After prototyping the product and validating the problem, they launched in 2019 with a viral explosion that still powers their bootstrapped growth. Six years later, Flodesk has over $30M in annual recurring revenues with 75 employees

#136: Practical Founder Has Big Exit and Un-Retires to Build 2nd SaaS Success - Brian Dosal Mar 21, 2025 01:11:26 Brian Dosal was the founder and CEO of BrightGauge, a software company he bootstrapped and grew to almost $10M ARR with his brother before successfully selling the company in 2019. BrightGauge was a business analytics and dashboard for key metrics for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry. After his intense 9-year journey at BrightGauge, Brian "retired" to spend more time with his growing

#135: Vertical SaaS Investor Shares Proven Paths to Scale Up Big – Dave Yuan Mar 14, 2025 55:49 Dave Yuan is the founder of Tidemark, an active growth equity investor focusing on vertical SaaS companies with outsized advantages that can become "control points" in their markets and grow very big. Dave and Tidemark have invested in successful companies like Toast, ServiceTitan, Karbon and Dutchie. In this episode, Dave shares some of the most useful strategic growth frameworks for vertical Sa

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