Hamed Mazrouei 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 turnkey connectivity and managed network services to thousands of businesses including restaurants, medical offices, law firms and car dealerships nationally. 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 management system to increase repeat customer business. They now have happy paying customers who use their powerful software which includes advanced data analytics. Hamed funded their development out of his other businesses and their vision is expanding based on early customer results.
Second-Time SaaS Founder Topics Discussed on This Podcast
- How owning and operating multiple small businesses prepared Hamed to grow multiple SaaS businesses
- How their newest product failed in the first customer implementations before they fixed and improved enough to have happy customers
- Why they didn’t raise funding for either of their ventures
- How he has funded all of his new ventures from profits from his other businesses
- Why he created a board of advisors with senior business leaders for his latest company
Quote from Hamed Mazrouei, CEO of Vivant, CEO of Milagro
“After four years, we rolled out the new product to a few customers. We thought we had it all covered—and it just flopped. Oh my God, I can’t believe this. So we iterated, rebuilt, updated, and went back. Flopped. Went back again. Flopped. And I think we lost like four or five customers. And every time it was catastrophic to come back home and say, ‘Did I just waste four years of my time and all these resources that I could have grown Vivant? What happened?’
“And then we got the first customer in September of 2021 and they’re still a customer. After that, things changed. We see a light at the end of the tunnel. We all believe that this is going to happen. Being so persistent and knowing that we will figure it out is what got us out of that.
“I wake up every day, get punched and then wake up again and go do it. I know that failures will happen. I you fail and you just pack up and go home, that’s a true failure. But if you fail multiple times, learn from it, improve and really truly believe in that vision. Otherwise, it’s going to become too painful at some point and you’re just going to throw in the towel.”
