The 10-Year Grind to Startup Success is Real

by | Sep 2, 2025

The 10-year grind. Startups sound sexy, but new startup founders should have more useful expectations about how to build a valuable software company.

AI or not. Funding or not. Smart founder or not.

Building a serious, valuable company to $10M in revenue is a hard, risky, and long process–when it works.

And 90% of SaaS startup founders will never get to that level of revenue and company value.

But it’s totally possible. It’s just not probable.

Most founders give up before they win bigger. Even the good ones.

Vince Mayfield, MBA is cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents, a co-parenting app for communication and coordination used by divorced parents raising children.

Cofounder Stephen Nixon was a lawyer with family cases who saw the need for a secure, unalterable communication record to improve co-parenting and family harmony.

He pitched a development company owned by Vince and Louis Anderson to build the first app.

They co-founded Talking Parents in 2016. Stephen worked with judges, courts, and lawyers to build awareness and get their first customers.

The app records and stores all communications between co-parents, including chats, messages, phone calls, and calendars.

The company started growing and eventually became profitable as word spread, they charged more for the product, and the app improved.

Talking Parents is now a profitable and growing company with well over $10 million in revenue, 65 employees, 100,000 paying customers, and 500,000 people using the app.

They are self-funded with no outside funding.

Check out this in-depth Practical Founders podcast interview with Vince Mayfield.

Greg Head posted this on LinkedIn on September 2, 2025.

Check out the comments and join the discussion on LinkedIn.

Related Posts

Grow a Bigger SaaS Company with Fewer People Headachess

New software startup founders sell themselves short when they tell me, “I never want more than 10 or 15 employees. I don’t think that would be any fun.” Yet they still want to build a valuable software company that doesn’t rely on the ...

Staying Alive Is a Critical Part of the Growth Game

What do 100% of bootstrapped SaaS businesses that grow to $5M or $10M in revenue have in common? These companies didn't die, and they didn't get stuck along the way. At least half of the game of getting to $10M in revenue is staying alive ...

The Biggest Problem Startup Founders Don’t Know They Have

“Fix our positioning” doesn’t appear on many to-do lists or strategic annual priorities. But the symptoms of positioning problems create daily friction and reduce the impact of any business execution. Positioning is the clarity you have ...
No results found.
Practical Founders eBook

FREE 60-PAGE EBOOK

Win the Startup Game Without VC Funding

Learn how all 75 founders on the Practical Founders Podcast created an average founder equity value of $50 million.