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•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Sam Knight is the co-founder and former president of BOLT Software, a project management and scheduling software for the construction trades that build residential homes. Sam helped lead the BOLT team as it grew before the company was sold and now he guides the BOLT product in the larger company. BOLT was created in 2015 after years of internal use at a large Dallas-based electrical contractor. Cofounder Josh Causey brought in Sam Knight to spin out and run BOLT as a separate software company an...
Jun 02, 2023•58 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Kern is an expert independent M&A advisor who has helped over 150 growing tech companies get financing, obtain investment, or sell their companies. He is Managing Director of Windstream Partners where he advises smaller SaaS and tech business owners in selling their companies for successful exits between $10M-$50M. Chris got his start on Wall Street working on large finance and acquisition deals, but he quickly shifted gears 20 years ago, moved to Phoenix, and started working only with sma...
May 26, 2023•58 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Joshua Strebel started a small SEO and website agency in the early 2000s after graduating from university. Joshua and his wife Sally experimented with website hosting using WordPress with low monthly fees while they ran their services business in Scottsdale, Arizona. WordPress became popular and eventually Pagely was formally launched as the first managed WordPress hosting platform in 2009 and they closed their services. business. Pagely grew steadily until 2013, when dozens of inexpensive manag...
May 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Dave Savage was a top-producing mortgage loan officer in the early 1990s who used computers and software to help him sell more. He became a software entrepreneur by creating a new software solution for loan officers to help them educate their clients and sell more. He sold $120,000 of Mortgage Coach on stage at a conference on their first day, which started their 25-year growth journey in the software business. Mortgage Coach helps loan officers transparently present loan options and educate the...
May 12, 2023•59 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Beth Sanders was selling computer software and equipment for a regional computer retailer in Ohio when she recorded her grandmother’s life stories on a tape recorder. It was so powerful she decided to create a website in 2001 that allowed anyone to journal and share their life stories. Many experiments led to her first paying customer in 2006: a senior care center that wanted to offer life journaling software to their seniors. The LifeBio software business was born. LifeBio is a leading “agetech...
May 05, 2023•53 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
