Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast with host Greg Head for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies--without big funding.
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Antony Ceravolo is a successful two-time startup founder from Adelaide, South Australia. He started his career in investment banking but left in 2002 to start a DVD rental business in London that raised funding from big VCs and Amazon. It grew into Lovefilm.com, which was later acquired by Amazon in 2011 to become part of their movie streaming service. He moved back to Adelaide and started Sine in 2013 to help schools, businesses, and large office buildings manage guest sign-ins more securely us...
Raj Khera is an experienced practical SaaS founder who has used search engine optimization (SEO) to grow businesses very efficiently. Now he coaches entrepreneurs at MoreBusiness on how to use organic SEO as a core part of their marketing engine. In this expert interview, I ask Raj to explain the basics of SEO for SaaS founders, what tools and techniques are most useful, and how SaaS founders can make the most of SEO investments to drive revenue faster. SEO for Bootstrapped SaaS Topics Discussed...
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...
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 ...
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...
Shameem Hameed, co-founder of ZH Healthcare, shares the story of building a bootstrapped, global digital health platform called BlueBriX. Serving enterprise clients and healthcare innovators, the company grew to nearly 200 employees by reinvesting profits and focusing on a flexible, configurable platform that clients can white-label. Shameem discusses the challenges of scaling, the importance of his team, and why they chose not to take outside funding despite their significant growth and impact.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Patrick Randolph shares the journey of building and selling QueueDr, a healthcare SaaS company that automated appointment scheduling. Starting lean with minimal funding, he discusses prototyping without code, the challenges of selling to the healthcare industry (from small practices to large systems), and the strategy behind growing revenue per employee. Patrick also reflects on the emotional side of the founder journey, burnout, the acquisition process by Phreesia, and life post-exit, including his current focus on helping other founders.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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'...
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...
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...
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&...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
