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, and Dharshan's mastery of SEO—becoming the top organic result for many key searches. The company ex...
Nov 21, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 171
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 typically works with founders selling their businesses for $20M–$200M, helping them prepare mate...
Nov 14, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 170
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 and made no revenue with a freemium model. With $25K in the bank and no revenue, the four cofounders ...
Nov 07, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 169
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-taking coexist to create compounding steady growth, creating massive long-term value fpr practical f...
Oct 31, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 168
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 DFdiscover, an enterprise-grade electronic data capture and management platform used in clinical stu...
Oct 24, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 167
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 SaaS founders are leveraging agents, vibe coding, and tools like OpenAI's Agent Kit to multiply outp...
Oct 17, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 166
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 separates $1M experiments from $10M companies. With clear meeting rhythms, disciplined execution, and st...
Oct 10, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 165
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 100 SaaS clients with a vetted pool of 500 senior U.S.-based engineers and CTOs. Typical engagement...
Oct 03, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 164
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 collaborated with over 400 SaaS companies, ranging from early-stage startups to rapidly growing compa...
Sep 26, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 163
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 speakers for hundreds of vertical SaaS founders, on November 5, 2025. In this episode, we discuss the prac...
Sep 19, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 162
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 their relationships in the context of their growing business. In this episode, we discuss a wide range...
Sep 12, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 161
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 companies that don't have custom software and their own teams to manage promotion spend and budget complia...
Sep 05, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 160
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 the first app. They came together to cofound TalkingParents in 2012. Stephen worked with judges, cour...
Aug 29, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 159
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 2020 and grew revenues steadily, doubling every year from $1M in 2022 to almost $10M in revenue in 20...
Aug 22, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 158
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 growth stalled, and it became clear they couldn't raise additional capital or grow big without funding. T...
Aug 15, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 157
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 engineering, finance, and marketing. They started in Pune, India, but both Sean and his father mov...
Aug 08, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 156
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. BatchService grew rapidly to $35 million in revenue by 2022, but regulation changes and economic sh...
Aug 01, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 155
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 last five years and is actively converting customers from legacy on-premise systems. With 40 employees ...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 154
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 company, integrated directly with Hubspot CRM. It includes voice calling, sophisticated SMS automation...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 153
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 requirements for lead tracking, quoting, proposal management, contracting, commissions, and pipeline...
Jul 11, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 152
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 integrates with special cameras at venue entrances to identify known security risks and ensure compliance. S...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 151
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 began to make improvements—and mistakes—as they started to grow. Josh had an ambition to grow the com...
Jun 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 150
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 marketing agencies in India to now distributing through ISV partners in all major global regions. The ...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 149
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 results through subscription and outcome-based pricing. They grew quickly to approximately $20 million...
Jun 13, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 148
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 bought and sold. They initially bootstrapped with a software development partner who accepted equity ...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 147
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 as word of mouth spread in the industry and their product evolved. In 2024, after growing to nearly ...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 146
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 integrated Planning, BI & data apps on the customers' data platforms. He grew his enterprise services co...
May 23, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 145
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 at several companies before joining Mainsail to focus on helping their portfolio companies scale up t...
May 16, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 144
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 funding from the founders and a few angel investors, Kimble started efficiently and grew steadily, eve...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 143
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 grew quickly in the NetSuite ecosystem, with a savvy team and no outside funding. Satori was sold it...
May 02, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 142
