Justin Hewett started in the software business as a territory sales manager for an education software company in Utah. The company grew and Justin eventually led the sales team as the senior executive. When the company was acquired by PE investors, Justin moved on in 2020 and thought about ideas for a new software business to serve K-12 schools in the US. Flashlight Learning helps K-12 teachers in the US to quickly assess the speaking and writing progress of multilingual students who are learnin...
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Morgan Katz is the founder and CEO of Ticketnology . Morgan was an enthusiastic athlete with a degree in sports management who started her career in ticket sales for sports teams and front-line venue management. Morgan saw how companies with season tickets had difficulty managing their digital tickets after COVID, so she started her own company to solve it with a software solution. Ticketnology is a fast-growing leader in the new category of season ticket management software. Started with a mix ...
Jan 12, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Stephanie Betters was a practicing Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery and an active real estate investor when her frustration with disparate real estate CRM and marketing solutions hit a boiling point. Salesforce and a development partner proposed a project so expensive that Stephanie hung up and decided to build the solution herself. She learned to code and build a useful real estate CRM on Salesforce in three months. Her business thrived with her comprehensive software. Other real estate inve...
Dec 29, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 76
Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a comprehensive and customizable platform used by hundreds of healthcare organizations around the world. ZH Healthcare now has almost 200 employees in the US and India. The company has been profitable every year and has not taken on any outside funding....
Dec 22, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Kevin McArdle spent 15 years working in large software companies before becoming a practical investor and acquirer of smaller SaaS businesses. Kevin is the CEO and co-founder of Big Band Software , a holding company that buys and holds small, profitable, and growing SaaS businesses—with no intent of selling those businesses. Kevin has acquired over 40 businesses in the last 10 years with this buy-and-hold model. As an expert guest on the podcast, Kevin answers common questions from practical fou...
Dec 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol , a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional staff. Their revenue cycle management (RCM) analytics software reveals medical billing problems and missed revenue opportunities at physician offices in the US. As the company expanded its service offerings, Viewgol grew very quickly, from three employees in...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 73
Hamed Mazrouie owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete multi-site internet phone system to thousands of restaurants and law firms across the US. Vivant grew steadily and profitably for 10 years and is now a maturing business with 50 employees. In the last four years, Hamed and his growing team have been building Milagro, a complete restaurant managemen...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their first customer, they rewrote the software to serve other customers and the Vegam Solutions business started to grow. Vegam Solutions is smart factory software for digital optimization and control of complex manufacturing plants. Vegam now has 180 remote e...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Jafar Owainati was a mechanical engineer before he got an MBA in entrepreneurship and decided to start a software company with two friends. They looked at many ideas before building software to help sales engineers respond to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) faster and easier. They launched Loopio in 2014 and had paying customers within one year. The three founders built the software and sold the first customers before adding more employees as they approached $1M ARR. They kept growing faster with ...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Miles Schwartz a cofounder of Zūm Rails , a fast-growing fintech based in Canada with a growing worldwide presence. In just 3.5 years and without any outside funding, Zūm Rails has grown from a focused startup to a credible open banking and instant payment gateway with $10M in ARR. Zum Rails also integrated KYC (Know Your Customer) technology which reduces fraud across all payment types. Miles and his cofounder had experience with fintech payments before they started Zum Rails to improve EFT pay...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising. He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he started a tech startup and participated in a tech accelerator. The Bridge started as a community and jobs platform connecting UX designers in Latin America to work at startups and large agencies worldwide. They expanded the services offerings and eventually grew to...
Nov 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 68
When Patrick Randolph discovered that doctors' offices lose 20% of appointments due to patient cancellations and no-shows, he set out to design and test a solution. QueueDr was created to fill those open slots with patients in the waitlist "queue." With just a little funding and lots of hard work, they began by helping small practices and group practices fill open slots with no human intervention. Eventually, they sold to larger organizations and became profitable as they grew. QueueDR was acqui...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Raj Khera has had three exits as a software entrepreneur and leader in his long career. His first company, GovCon, grew in the late 1990s to help government contractors easily access new contracts up for bid by the US government. Their advertising and subscription revenues grew quickly, and he sold GovCon in 1999 for $12.5 million. He bootstrapped one of the first email marketing software businesses in the early 2000s called MailerMailer to help small businesses send emails. Raj and his brother ...
Oct 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Robin Alex worked in a digital marketing agency in Dallas when he discovered their small business clients struggled to nurture and follow up with their website leads. In 2018, Robin and two developers prototyped a marketing automation and CRM software that could help other agencies solve this problem for their clients. They pitched the product and got a great response. They built their first product and HighLevel grew quickly. HighLevel grew fast as word of mouth and referrals spread in the agen...
Oct 13, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Mike Roberts is the founder and CEO of SpyFu , a leading competitive research tool for marketers and entrepreneurs with over 15,000 paid customers and hundreds of thousands of free users. SpyFu was launched in 2006 and has been a profitable and bootstrapped business for almost 18 years. Mike is a happy founder who splits his time between leading the business and his personal pursuits, which include surfing and spending time with his family. He is still passionate about innovation, search marketi...
Oct 06, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Raution Jaiswal grew up in India and then worked in management roles at large companies in the US before he discovered a problem experienced by small insurance agencies. He validated the problem, built an early solution, and didn’t quit his full-time job in 2018 until he had 50 paying customers. InsuredMine provides an all-in-one sales CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing automation software for independent insurance agencies in the US. InsuredMine helps improve and automate mark...
Sep 29, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Kelly Mann was a CPA and auditor for 15 years before leaving her employer to start her own CPA firm focused on 401K benefits audits. She discovered a need to automate this process, validated the market with other CPAs, and created the first AuditMiner software. Unfortunately, Kelly was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer just before launch and started aggressive chemotherapy immediately. After a year of treatment, AuditMiner was launched, and CPA firms lined up to buy it. With her treatments an...
Sep 22, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Praveen Ghanta graduated from MIT with computer science and economics degrees and worked for various financial services companies after trying his hand at a software startup. Working in his spare time, he built a product and recruited a cofounder to help sell it. After trying to sell it to different types of financial services companies, they finally found a valuable use case with individual wealth managers to help them sell new clients. They quit their jobs and launched HiddenLevers. HiddenLeve...
Sep 15, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Oliver Low worked for Microsoft and then MySpace in London before creating a successful digital agency in 2010 with two friends. Their agency grew fast and was profitable, so they invested in building software apps to solve problems that they faced helping big brands promote on the web. One of those products, Platform360, turned into a real SaaS product business which became their focus in 2013. Platform360 was a programmatic ad platform for large brands to manage digital advertising in the chan...
Sep 08, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 60
In this expert interview, Vik Thapar of Cypress Growth Capital explains revenue-based financing (RBF) and how it can be very useful for practical SaaS founders. In the last 10 years, Vik and the Cypress team have funded over 50 SaaS and tech-enabled services businesses that have steady recurring revenues and predictable customer acquisition approaches. Revenue-based financing is a form of non-dilutive funding that is paid back as a fixed percentage of cash receipts until the investment is paid o...
Sep 01, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Bryan Clayton is the co-founder and CEO of Greenpal , a leading on-demand marketplace of lawn care services for homeowners across the US. With a team of 25 remote employees, they help 300,000 homeowners connect with 35,000 landscape service providers. Greenpal is an “overnight success that took 10 years” while the founding team learned to build a software product and recruit homeowners and services pros to the marketplace. It grew slowly at first as they learned and made mistakes, but they didn’...
Aug 25, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Ben Murray is a former SaaS CFO and finance professional who helps SaaS founders understand the basics of SaaS accounting, finance, and metrics for their growing businesses. Ben has a popular blog and podcast with free educational resources to learn advanced SaaS metrics, learn finance best practices, and hear stories from other founders. In this expert interview, I ask Ben all the questions that I hear from startup founders and SaaS CEOs about finance and accounting operations. Ben is very expe...
Aug 11, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Wissam Tabbara is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple software startups in Seattle since 2009 when he left Microsoft where he was a software development manager. He led multiple startup technology teams and now is an experienced CEO and business builder. In 2021 he founded Truebase, a B2B prospecting platform for revenue teams using the power of generative AI accelerates the prospecting journey. Wissam steps back to assess his startup adventures more objectively and shares his biggest...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Lloyed Lobo is the co-founder and former president of Boast.ai , a leading platform to help software companies in the US and Canada to redeem available government tax credits. Initially started in 2012 as a services business helping companies administer tax credits, Boast.ai was launched as a technology-powered platform that scaled their business much faster. Technology-powered Boast.ai was launched in 2017 after starting a services business in 2012 that helped larger company administer their R&...
Jul 29, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Ryan Goodman joined the startup in the early days of the business intelligence and analytics market in 2003 as a specialist helping large customers adopt this new technology. This startup was acquired by the successful BI company Business Objects, which was then acquired by the huge software company SAP. Ryan left to start consulting and build niche add-on "feature products" in the SAP Business Objects ecosystem. They experimented with product ideas and consulting services before finding an oppo...
Jul 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 54
As the host of the Practical Founders Podcast, I have interviewed 46 successful SaaS founders and 6 savvy experts in the first year of weekly episodes. In this episode, I share some of the deeper insights, surprising lessons, and useful perspective that I have learned after so many great conversations. Practical founders are building valuable software companies without big funding all over the world and in every corner of the software business. It's an amazing time to be a practical founder. Pra...
Jul 14, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Patrick Fingles grew a successful roofing company with hundreds of employees in the Baltimore-Washington DC area. In 2013, they created their own software to help new salespeople estimate, quote, and close new roofing sales. They started selling the software to other contractors in 2016 and called it Leap. Leap grew fast to $7 million ARR in 2021 with Patrick as the CEO. In 2021, they decided to take some growth funding from Nexa Equity to give Patrick and his cofounders their "first bite" of su...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Jordan Fleming grew up in Toronto and New York, then lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for 15 years where he created a successful consultancy helping larger businesses automate and improve their processes. His experience developing workflow apps led him and his cofounders to create a tightly-integrated phone system solution called smrtPhone built just for the Podio workflow platform, which is very popular in several industries. Jordan now lives in Poland and most of the team works in their office in ...
Jun 23, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 51
Gregory Shepard is a serial entrepreneur who has created and sold 12 companies, including marketing software and ad technology companies. In 2016, he sold two of his bootstrapped software companies, AffiliateTraction and AdAssured to eBay for an undisclosed "f*ck-ton of money," as he describes it. He is now an author, speaker, philanthropist, investor, and the creator of Startup Science and BOSS, an open-source business operating system to help more startups succeed. Gregory faced monumental cha...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Deepak Sindwani is a former software entrepreneur who has been a professional investor in software companies for over 20 years. Deepak is the co-founder and managing partner of Wavecrest Growth Partners , a growth equity investor in practical B2B SaaS companies. Wavecrest specializes in helping bootstrapped and capital-efficient founders of vertical B2B SaaS companies reduce risk and grow their companies from $5M-$10M ARR to $30M-$50M ARR and drastically increase the value of their companies. Gr...
Jun 09, 2023•52 min
