Startup success stories are often told by a single founder. But usually, there’s another founder involved.
The co-founder. Another crazy person with the same passion and grit (and deferred wages), but with completely different skills and superpowers.
- Sometimes, it’s a technical founder with a business founder.
- Or an industry domain expert with an experienced SaaS leader.
- Sometimes, it’s husband and wife. Or wife and husband.
Either way, co-founders have to divide and conquer. There’s a lot to do.
And it doesn’t help if both founders have the same skills and personality types.
So who would be the perfect co-founder complement for a crazy entrepreneur with deep experience in an industry?
It would be someone like Sean Meister, co-founder of M2M in Motion.
Sean left his successful executive career in medical and hospital supply sales to join his old friend in a software startup with a crazy idea: to make it easy for smaller trucking companies to track their trucks and trailers with GPS devices and simple software.
His friend, Marc, was the crazy entrepreneur who knew the trucking industry and could sell their first visionary deals.
Sean was the operator. The systems thinker. The executer. The team builder. The Get S%*t Done person.
They bootstrapped their scrappy SaaS business for two years before sales took off with a solid product for a small segment of the market.
Then customer funding took over as their revenues grew.
It didn’t hurt that a new federal safety regulation mandated the tracking of trucks to make sure truckers didn’t drive too long and get tired.
Sean and Marc partnered to grow their business up to almost $5 million in total revenue in 6 years.
They had finally focused their product features and narrowed in to a specific customer target. And they had developed a variety of sales and marketing channels.
One of those sales channels created a strategic partner that eventually bought M2M in Motion in 2021.
Listen to Sean tell his side of their story on the Practical Founders Podcast.
Thanks for sharing your real story, Sean!
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