Josh Haynam grew up in the Central Valley of California just 100 miles from the tech center of Silicon Valley--without any awareness of tech jobs or tech businesses when he lived there. He was a successful high school entrepreneur, then supported himself through his college years with his digital SEO agency. Their experiments with custom website quizzes showed promising results, so Josh and his cofounder friends started a company to build the first lead-generation online quizzes as a standalone ...
Apr 28, 2023•56 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Esben Friis-Jensen was a technology professional in Copenhagen, Denmark before he and three Danish friends moved to San Francisco in 2013 to start a new startup called Cobalt. Cobalt.io grew steadily and raised several rounds of VC funding to become a sizable cybersecurity software company in Silicon Valley. Cobalt serves large businesses with a platform and services for larger companies to efficiently test and find security holes in their websites and web applications. Esben left Cobalt in 2020...
Apr 21, 2023•1 hr•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Massimo Arrigoni grew up in Milan, Italy, and moved to California 27 years ago to create software products and start a family, eventually moving to the San Francisco area in Silicon Valley. While leading product at the software company MailUp, a popular Italian email marketing software, his team built and tested a better visual editor for creating email templates and website landing pages. The free software tool called BEE ("Best Email Editor") became popular and a new product line was born. BEE...
Apr 14, 2023•1 hr•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast “My B2B SaaS startup needs just more warm leads. But we have struggled when we hire junior salespeople to call on and email cold prospects to generate qualified leads that the CEO or salespeople can close.” This is a common frustration for startup and early-stage SaaS founders when they hire sales development reps (SDRs) or business development reps (BDRs) to generate qualified leads. There are many misconceptions and pitfalls that make this even more challenging. Christine Rogers shares her exp...
Apr 07, 2023•56 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Dave Whorton is an experienced tech investor and funded founder who spent the first 20 years of his career at the highest levels of Silicon Valley venture capital and tech-boom startups. He started his career at Hewlett Packard and experienced the famous "HP Way" culture firsthand before he attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He joined the preeminent tech venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and worked directly with John Doerr for several years before launching Good Technology and...
Mar 31, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Windermere Real Estate is a large and well-known residential real estate broker in the Seattle area. In the late 1990s, they invested to build an internal software system to power their own business and differentiate their services. After using and improving their software for over 10 years, the family owners of Windermere spun out the software as a new company called MoxiWorks . They hired experienced tech entrepreneur and marketer York Baur to lead the new MoxiWorks business as CEO in 2012. Af...
Mar 24, 2023•50 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Patrick Campbell wasn't expecting to be an entrepreneur when he grew up, but after his first few jobs, he struck out on his own in 2012 to create a software company to help SaaS businesses optimize their pricing. Price Intelligently quickly evolved into a tech-enabled service that allowed him to grow, build a team, and ultimately launch ProfitWell. ProfitWell is a free and powerful SaaS metrics product that automatically calculates MRR, ARR, churn, and other import financial measures for SaaS an...
Mar 16, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jon Nordmark founded eBags.com in 1998 as one of the first Internet e-commerce companies and grew it into the largest online retailer of luggage, bags, and travel accessories. Jon was previously a successful corporate executive who led marketing for Samsonite. eBags raised $30 million of VC funding in 1999 and survived the dot-com boom and the 2001 bust era, but the crazy growth expectations of VC investors often felt misaligned with the profitable growth path of the company and the market. eBag...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast Perry Rosenbloom moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2011 and started a small business offering digital marketing and custom website services. After building a website for his mother-in-law, an independent therapist, Perry created a scrappy subscription-based website builder platform to make websites for other behavioral health professionals. The Brighter Vision company grew steadily and efficiently without big outside funding and eventually provided custom mobile-ready websites and marketing tools to...
Mar 03, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Gopal Krishnamurthy was an early BI and data analytics expert working for a large company when he left to start a BI consulting company called Visual BI in 2010. Visual BI grew to over 300 employees serving enterprise customers as an evangelist to push emerging Data & Analytics trends with SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, SAP Analytics Cloud, Snowflake, DBT, and Microsoft Power BI . They also created several add-on products, which Gopal and his partner Jay retained when he sold the Visual BI consulting com...
Feb 24, 2023•52 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Watson was a two-time software company with two successful exits before he was 40 years old. He started his first company, VinSolutions , in his basement in Kansas City in 2006. VinSolutions started by helping auto dealers upload photos of their cars to sell in the popular Autotrader catalog and website. Matt was the first developer and product visionary who lead a team that build their popular CRM and lead management system to help those dealers manage internet leads and sell cars faster. ...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast Deb Muller was an experienced HR executive at a large global company who left her job to start a consultancy specializing in managing important employee incident investigations. Surprisingly, her customers asked her for a software solution that included her best practices, so she mocked up some screens and had someone build the first version in 2009. She started selling it to fellow HR leaders and her software company HR Acuity was born. Professional management of employee incident investigation...
Feb 10, 2023•53 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast Vivek Bhaskaran was a computer science student in college who worked on an online survey tool for a professor in the marketing department. After school, he built a new survey tool with a fellow software developer while they still held their day jobs. QuestionPro grew slowly and profitably with efficient search engine optimization and viral marketing, avoiding the need to raise any money from outside investors. QuestionPro grew steadily by expanding the product with more powerful features for lar...
Feb 03, 2023•58 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast Scott McCausland was an experienced software sales leader who decided to go out on his own in 2008 to build a new software business. His technical cofounder built the first version of their new software and Scott started selling it. MVP Systems Software was underway without any outside funding. They kept adding name-brand customers who used their JAMS workload automation and scheduling software in their IT departments for a variety of scheduling and automation tasks that saved time and money. It...
Jan 27, 2023•53 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast Oliver Palmer helped start a mobile app development agency in Sydney, Australia that built simple apps for early mobile phones. When the iPhone launched, Tigerspike grew very fast by creating branded mobile apps for large companies with its high-end design and development services. Tigerspike also created its own software product—a mobile application development platform with subscription fees—to try to transition into a product-based company to grow faster with VC funding. This was difficult as...
Jan 20, 2023•59 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast Sandeep Kumar quit his job working for an Indian consulting company to start a software company in 2005 when product-focused startups were not common in India. For the next 10 years, they experimented with product features and customer profiles until they finally found an important buyer with budget power who needed their must-have software. ProductDossier is now a comprehensive platform for enterprise consulting and IT services companies in India to manage project financials, project resources,...
Jan 13, 2023•59 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Hum studied graphic design at university before she discovered she loved to help software startups create new products. She moved to Silicon Valley to work at Facebook as a product designer, but a side project helped her find a problem she wanted to solve. So she quit her job and built an initial software product called Canny with her technical cofounder while traveling the world together as nomading entrepreneurs. Within a year, Canny created enough revenue for them to live and travel fru...
Jan 06, 2023•55 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Abbott was an active investor and board member for 20 years when he realized that most of the 100+ companies he helped were not good a their “business fundamentals.” The fundamentals of setting long-term goals, making short-term plans, and then aligning teams and individuals to make efficient progress. He thought of writing a book but discovered the book “Traction” by Gino Wickman and his branded EOS® (Entrepreneurial Operating System) system. Mark worked with his cofounders in 2016 to crea...
Dec 30, 2022•51 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Craig Letton quit his corporate sales job in 2011 to take over his parents’ small printing business in Scotland. It was his first time running a business and he learned hard business lessons quickly. Eventually, he discovered a huge need for custom-printed promotional materials by frontline salespeople in the global drinks and beverage industry. He sold their printing equipment to focus just on the software to solve this tricky problem for those salespeople, marketing departments, and regional p...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Jeff Matlow is a serial entrepreneur and a crazy triathlete and a long-distance runner who found a way to put those passions together in a software startup that grew up fast. He saw an opportunity to create a better registration experience for endurance events like 5Ks, marathons, and triathlons. In 2008, he sold the big deal to USA Triathlon and set out to build the website and registration platform he envisioned. The company I Am Athlete (now called imATHLETE) went live with their platform and...
Dec 09, 2022•49 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Howard Gottlieb created and sold several businesses before starting a school fundraising website in 2003 called Easy Fundraising Ideas. It grew into the most popular Internet website for school fundraisers. He experimented with many business models and ideas while the fundraising industry still wasn’t changing or growing. In 2012, Howard started Read-a-Thon as a literacy-based fundraising platform that helped students raise money while boosting education. Their easy platform and simple fundraisi...
Dec 02, 2022•56 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Pickard didn’t know he was embarking on a 15-year software entrepreneurial journey when he signed on to manage a horse veterinary practice in Calgary, Canada. But they had built some internal software to help them manage their large practice that drastically improved their business results. Soon other horse vets wanted their HVMS software and the Business Infusions software business was created with Scott leading the small team. Business Infusions grew steadily without big budgets, big fun...
Nov 25, 2022•58 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Josh Cameron and three university friends started a scrappy software company in Brisbane Australia just after graduating. They had run the popular college bar where they discovered there was no simple software solution to track, onboard, and schedule hourly employees. They started Tanda in 2012 and it grew into a successful workforce management software company in Australia —without any outside funding. The four founders moved to Chicago in 2019 to expand their North American business. Their pro...
Nov 18, 2022•47 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Joe Griffin recently left his job of 8 years as co-CEO of ClearVoice, a company that he and co-founder Jay Swanson started in 2014 out of their digital marketing agency business in Phoenix, Arizona. ClearVoice was acquired by Fiverr in 2019 and has been operating as an independent subsidiary since then. Fiverr is now a large public company with a global reach. ClearVoice was created in the fast-changing web search marketing industry in 2014 out of the need from larger companies for high-quality ...
Nov 11, 2022•57 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast John Francis is a general partner at Stout Street Capital, a venture capital fund based in Denver, Colorado. Stout Street has made 70 small seed and pre-seed investments in software startups outside the big tech centers in North America. Unlike big Silicon Valley VCs, almost half of Stout Street's investments are in practical startups that have reasonable valuations, sustainable growth models, and won’t need more outside investment before they exit. In this in-depth interview with a “practical f...
Oct 28, 2022•51 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Zach Moreno was a full-stack developer and coding instructor in Northern California in 2015 when he discovered audio podcasts. There wasn't a remote podcast software for recording high-quality audio over the Internet, so he decided to create one. He and his childhood friend Rock Felder started working on their product and startup idea while they still had full-time jobs, with Zach as the CEO and CTO. Now Squadcast is one of the leading podcast recording studio platforms used by tens of thousands...
Oct 21, 2022•52 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Karl Swannie was a geographer working in the scenic city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, when he started analyzing social media data based on location. He quickly saw there was valuable real-time information that was not being used, so he started Echosec Systems to find a practical use for those insights. After several years of experiments and hard startup lessons learned, Echosec finally shifted from being an inexpensive news/insights tool to a comprehensive threat intelligence platform ...
Oct 14, 2022•50 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Brad Redding calls his first startup a "successful failure." It didn't end well, but he learned several very important lessons that helped him be more successful with his second startup, Elevar. Now the bootstrapped SaaS company is growing steadily with 45 remote employees. And Brad is learning fast to be a capable CEO of a larger SaaS software company. Brad's deep experience with e-commerce advertising data and conversation tracking analytics helped him find a problem to solve. He and his cofou...
Oct 07, 2022•50 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Yuabov was a 22-year-old IT manager in New York who wanted to buy a new car. He was so frustrated with the buying experience that he started a software company called Carvoy to make it easy for car buyers to find, buy, and finance a new car online. He grew the company for 5 years—without VC funding—and sold it to a giant Fortune 500 company in 2020. Daniel quit his job in 2015 to build Carvoy's first product using developers in Ukraine. It allowed consumers to choose a new car online and ...
Sep 30, 2022•50 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast Melissa Kwan created her first software company in 2014 and then sold it in 2019. It was extremely difficult to start and even harder to grow, but it's how she learned what not to do in her next startup and what was really "non-negotiable" in her life. Now she's a nomadic world traveler and the founder of a growing software business. Melissa started Spacio to provide a technology solution to high-end residential real estate agents to capture visitor names electronically at open houses. It took y...
Sep 23, 2022•52 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast 
