Every year, especially now, the formula for SaaS success is less about raising money and more about these three things:
1. Laser focus on a specific customer problem
2. An efficient way to reach and sell to them
3. Crazy persistence over many years
Wayne Cartmel is the founder and CEO of MyNewTerm a specialized hiring marketplace and applicant tracking system that connects schools across England directly with job seekers.
It allows educational employers to post vacancies and manage candidates using a streamlined workflow that supports part-time, full-time, and temporary roles.
Wayne grew up on a small farm in the Lake District region of northwest England and trained as a maths teacher in Bedfordshire.
He was frustrated by the process he had to go through to apply for teaching jobs — hours of Word-based application forms, one after another. He asked why nobody had digitized it, and then decided to do it himself.
Funded by a £5,000 innovation voucher and built with a computer science volunteer who is still his CTO eleven years later, it took two years to reach a working prototype.
Wayne took no funding, went over £100,000 into personal debt, and did not draw a livable salary for several years. He also has been a professional English football referee for the last 12 years.
MyNewTerm now partners with over 6,000 schools and 500 multi-academy trusts, has surpassed £5M in revenue, and processes over 100,000 candidate applications a month with just 20 employees.
It holds roughly 45% market share among multi-academy trusts against a private-equity-backed incumbent.
It was difficult to get MyNewTerm going as a thriving business, even before AI. But the biggest challenge is still the same, as he describes it:
“Distribution and execution are everything, because the market nowadays is going to be flooded with software products, EdTech in particular. The advancements in AI mean that you can spin up products really quickly. I almost wish that was available ten years ago when I was starting as a non-technical founder.
“Building the product is the easy bit; I thought it would be the hard bit. What I failed to realize, and I wish somebody had told me, is that it’s actually the distribution and the sales and marketing, the go-to-market motion, that’s the really tough bit, doubly hard with a two-sided marketplace.”
Wayne has been an active member of my Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups for several years. It has been an honor to work with him and see his company grow from crazy startup to sustainable scale-up.
Check out this amazing interview with Wayne Cartmel on the Practical Founders Podcast.
