The journey of successful software companies is most often told with a revenue line that goes up and to the right.

We don’t hear much about the internal growth that had to happen to make that topline growth happen.

The unlikely evolution from a scrappy startup team to a scalable global factory.

A company’s internal development growth path is never a straight line.

It’s more like stairs.

With stair-like steps between stalled improvements and the big changes that support new growth.

And most companies never get to the next level.

Vivek Bhaskaran bootstrapped QuestionPro to over $30 million ARR and 300 global employees. They are headed towards $100 million in a few years.

Their internal growth wasn’t a straight line. Still isn’t.

They grew to $1 million fast, then they had to regroup to build their initial team and mature their product to get to $4 million.

Then they had flat growth for a couple of years as they developed their management team and repeatable systems and processes that enabled them to grow to $10 million ARR–before stalling out again.

Getting to $30 million was about having the right executive leaders and expanding globally. And keeping up with his changing role as the CEO.

You just can’t run a 200-employee organization like you ran your 20-person team or your 3-person startup.

You can’t be the same kind of CEO, either.

Listen to their amazing bootstrapped growth story and hear how Vivek helped develop the QuestionPro company along the way.

Check out this interview with Vivek Bhaskaran on the Practical Founders Podcast.

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