Roy van den Broek is the founder and CEO of Rentman, a rental business management software platform for event and media production companies. Roy built software for his event equipment rental business in the Netherlands. He ...
Practical Founders Podcast with Greg Head
Every week, host Greg Head interviews a successful software founder who started, grew, and sometimes sold a valuable software company—without big funding.
Over $9 billion in founder equity value has been created by over 100 SaaS founders interviewed on this podcast so far. That’s an average of $75 million founder of equity value created by each company.
No Outside Funding
Rachit Khator is the founder and CEO of Stackby, a no-code spreadsheet and database app builder that allows business users to create powerful spreadsheet-like applications with data links, automations, and workflows. Rachit and his team of ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...
Erin Fletter had a long career in the restaurant business before starting an after-school enrichment program to teach kids how to cook at her daughters' school in 2011. Her cooking program became popular, and she improved and expanded it to ...
Mike Trasatti spent 10 years in the automotive dealer software business before he found an auto dealer in Iowa who had built is own complete software system. They partnered up in 2008, and Mike became the first CEO of the spinout software ...
Jeff Corn is the co-founder and former CEO of Virtuance, one of the US's leading real estate photography and marketing providers. In 2010, Jeff was in the real estate investment business and wondered why it took $10,000 and nearly a month to ...
Charlie Alsmiller is the founder and CEO of APIWORX, a powerful integration platform for mid-sized ecommerce companies. Charlie is an experienced, practical founder who has created and grown several software companies. His first venture was ...
Joe McMenemon and his college roommate, Brendan, knew they wanted to start a business together. They had run their college fraternity chapter and saw the problem of managing members and collecting payments. So they lived frugally and built ...
Nathan Hirsch, co-founder of FreeUp, shares his journey of building and selling the company and his other business adventures. FreeUp provides clients with pre-vetted virtual assistants (VAs) and freelancers in an online marketplace.
Nathan ...
Ian Brodie, the co-founder and CEO of Levanta, shares his journey of building a successful SaaS company in the affiliate marketing space.
Levanta is an affiliate marketing platform for Amazon sellers, enabling them to connect with content ...
Esben Friis-Jensen and his cofounder, Sebastian Seilund, teamed up in 2021 to create Userflow, a no-code user onboarding product for SaaS companies. This week, it was announced that Userflow has been acquired by Beamer, a maker of product user ...
Antony Ceravolo is a successful two-time startup founder from Adelaide, South Australia. He started his career in investment banking but left in 2002 to start a DVD rental business in London that raised funding from big VCs and Amazon. It grew ...
Morgan Katz is the founder and CEO of Ticketnology. Morgan was an enthusiastic athlete with a degree in sports management who started her career in ticket sales for sports teams and front-line venue management. Morgan saw how companies with ...
#76: Real Estate Investor Built Her Own CRM Solution and Created a Market Leader – Stephanie Betters
Stephanie Betters was a practicing Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery and an active real estate investor when her frustration with disparate real estate CRM and marketing solutions hit a boiling point. Salesforce and a development partner ...
Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, 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 ...
Raj Khera has had three exits in his long career as a software entrepreneur and leader. 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Praveen Ghanta graduated from MIT with degrees in computer science and economics 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 ...
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 ...
Patrick Fingles grew a successful roofing company with hundreds in the Baltimore-Washington DC area. In 2013, they created software to help new salespeople estimate, quote, and close new roofing sales. They started selling the software to other ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 who supported ...
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 ...
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, ...
"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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Vivek Bhaskaran was a computer science student in college who worked on an online survey project for a professor in the marketing department. After university, he built a new survey tool with a fellow software developer while they still held ...
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 ...
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 ...
Sarah Hum studied graphic design in 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 ...
Howard Gottlieb created and sold several businesses before starting a school fundraising website in 2003 called Easy Fundraising Ideas. It grew into the most popular Internet website for school fundraisers. He experimented with many business ...
Josh Cameron and three university friends started a scrappy software company in Brisbane Australia just after graduating. They had run the popular college bar where they discovered there was no simple software solution to track, onboard, and ...
Zach Moreno was a full-stack developer and coding instructor in Northern California in 2015 when he discovered audio podcasts. There wasn't a remote podcast software for recording high-quality audio over the Internet, so he decided to create ...
Brad Redding calls his first startup a “successful failure.” It didn’t end well, but he learned several very important lessons that helped him be more successful with his second startup, Elevar. Now the bootstrapped SaaS company is growing steadily with 45 remote employees. And Brad is learning fast to be a capable CEO of a larger SaaS software company.
Daniel Yuabov was a 22-year-old IT manager in New York who wanted to buy a new car. He was so frustrated with the buying experience that he started a software company called Carvoy to make it easy for car buyers to find, buy, and finance a ...
Melissa Kwan created her first software company in 2014 and then sold it in 2019. It was extremely difficult to start and even harder to grow, but it’s how she learned what not to do in her next startup and what was really “non-negotiable” in her life. Now she’s a nomadic world traveler and the founder of a growing software business.
Sean Meister was a sales professional and leader with a successful career selling hospital and medical supplies before he left to join his long-time friend who had a vision for a new software company serving smaller trucking fleets with simple ...
Jeremy Clarke created, grew, and sold his software company in a most unusual and successful way:
He grew WebMerge to $5M revenue by just himself for 6 years before hiring his first and only employee, a strategic sales rep. It's an incredible ...
Luke Hohmann was an engineering and product management leader at Silicon Valley startups before he became an acclaimed author and speaker in the enterprise software development world. He used funding from his consulting business—plus revenue ...
Steve Gelley created two successful businesses and learned important lessons before he and a cofounder self-funded a third startup that was acquired in only 18 months for a big prize.
Steve started his entrepreneurial journey by buying, ...
Hamid Shojaee is a technical founder and serial entrepreneur who created several software companies and dozens of products in the last 25 years. He sold his two software companies in 2021—Axosoft and Pure Chat—and now is an active investor and ...
Rafael Zimberoff was CEO of ShipRush, a software company he founded in 2001, then grew and eventually sold in 2017 to Descartes Systems Group for $17 million. Rafael started ShipRush as an add-on product for popular CRM and accounting software ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...
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