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•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
