In the last three weeks, I talked to 56 practical SaaS founders from all over the world about their products, businesses, and their visions.
Since they aren’t trying to raise outside funding to grow their valuable software companies, they all have one surprising thing in common:
They are all doing it in their own very different ways.
No two practical founders and markets and products and approaches are alike.
Sure, they all are building great software for happy customers and growing revenues to invest in people to scale up without outside funding.
But no two practical founder stories were the same. They never are.
- Every founder has different skills, experiences, and personalities.
- Each market they serve is different.
- How they funded their initial investment is different. Some with their time, savings, profits from another business, pre-sales, grants, or practical angel funding. Or all of those.
- Their GTM and marketing and sales approaches vary wildly. They are not following any VC-backed playbooks.
- They are in different markets. San Francisco is different from Chicago or Bangalore or London or Atlanta or remote.
- They have different expectations for their end games. They keep their optionality so they can change their minds too.
- They follow what works for them this month in their business. They make their own playbooks, variations on the common themes.
- These founders all have different lifestyles too. Some work a lot, some work less.
They are all taking pieces of what works for other SaaS companies and creating useful variations that work just for themselves.
That’s different from their VC-funded peers. There are few standard playbooks and templates for growing fast when you have money to spend.
Since there are just a few types of VCs that all have the same ultimate goal of bringing a return to their investors, there are just a few templates to follow to grow and sell your company in 5-10 years.
When you don’t have those templates from big funders, practical founders can find infinite useful variations on how to do everything with their products, businesses, organizations, and their personal lives.
That’s the superpower of practical founders. You can do it your way and make that work for you.
You can mix your products, revenue engines, customer targets, employee mixes, cultures, end-game goals, lifestyle, and most importantly, PACE, in a way that works for you.
Most of these practical founders are up and running with growing revenues, happy customers, and dedicated teams.
But no two founder stories were alike.
I’m infinitely curious about all these amazing people and their unique stories. I learn something new from every founder I talk to.
In most of these conversations, I send a link to a particular Practical Founders podcast episode where a founder shared something about their journey that shows something useful.
Each of their stories is unique. And it’s working.
#practicalfounders
