Practical Founders Blog

AI can strengthen your established and practical SaaS business, even in your slower-moving vertical market. It's not all about about AI-first...yet. Maybe you brushed off AI tech and ignored it. You've got plenty to do in your SaaS business ...

Most startups experiments don’t grow up into real companies. Many startups fail outright, especially when they took on “Go Big or Go Home” VC funding. Most of those go home. Dori Yona is co-founder and CEO of SimpleClosure, a technology- ...

Vertical SaaS founders each serve different markets, fund in different ways, and have different goals and outcomes. Why should their SaaS benchmarks be the same as those at VC-funded horizontal software companies? Are you a ...

Every practical SaaS founder I know works hard, takes risks, and does things normal people don’t do—for a long time. But how much of our successes came from "luck" as we define it? Most things we do don’t work out so well, but some things ...

Tech-enabled services companies are a lot like a SaaS business. Many of them evolve into software-first companies with extra services. They have recurring revenues with MRR, CAC, LTV, ACV,, churn, and net revenue retention metrics. They ...

Most tech services entrepreneurs who try to build a new software product business don’t reach SaaS nirvana, with a growing recurring revenue product business that is worth much more to the founders. But this services-to-software shift is ...

I can judge the experience level of a startup founder or investor by how they use SaaS benchmarks. Newbies learn the general metrics and averages; experienced founders go much deeper and find their own way. The great thing about the SaaS ...

There is an active crowd of founders with side gig SaaS startups who are winning the fast-start, fast-flip game in their own terms. Troy Munson was a successful enterprise SaaS sales rep for several years, but he wanted more control over his ...

SaaS product startups are often created out of service businesses. It's rare for an experienced product builder to create a successful services business. But it happens. Last year I interviewed three-time SaaS founder Matt Watson on my ...

I spoke at the Tidemark VSaaS Collective Live event in San Francisco last week. Over 100 vertical SaaS founders came to learn from each other and meet their peers. Here are 5 things I learned at this event: 1) Some vertical SaaS companies ...

People have been sending me "SaaS is Dead" articles and posts almost every day in the last month. That makes for better clickbait headlines than the real truth that "SaaS is Changing, and It's Complicated." Here is how I see it this ...

Profit is profit, right? Not in the software business, where all profits are not equal. Here are 11 different definitions of SaaS profit used this year in SaaS: Dream Profits - If we grow fast enough and throw enough money at it, someday ...

Vertical SaaS used to be a sleepy and scrappy corner of the entire software market, but now, about half of all software companies are industry-focused. They don't create many billion-dollar companies we know about or attract monster VC ...

One of my favorite SaaS CEOs is hiring her first VP of marketing after years of successful growth and success. This is the best senior marketing leadership opportunity I have seen in years in SaaS--for the right kind of marketing ...

This year's headwinds of slower growth and reduced VC funding for B2B SaaS companies have created an opportunity for serious SaaS founders who didn't raise institutional funding: It's easier to hire best-fit executive leaders to help your ...

For every product or service we can’t live without now, I’ll show you there was a time when it didn’t exist. Someone made it up when it was uncommon and “crazy” to imagine it. In the early days of every startup that grew up, there was always ...

Many new SaaS CEOs hope for a magical SaaS executive hire who will fix their major problems in sales, development, or marketing next quarter. Unfortunately, expensive exec hires don’t always work out so well. Experienced software CEOs ...

When my son graduated from university with a degree in electrical engineering in 2017, he didn't join a big company for his first job. He created a tech startup with a friend. For the next few months, his friends and his parent’s friends ...

When you don’t raise big VC funding, you get to do it your way and succeed on your terms. No two founders do it the same way. And here's yet another way to do it, in episode 100 of the Practical Founders Podcast. Erin Fletter is one of those ...

SaaS CEOs who grow past 40 employees have to learn how to hire and lead senior leaders who will help their businesses grow, not just the junior leaders who got them up and running. Senior executive leaders differ from junior leaders regardless ...

I spent five days in the SF Bay Area with B2B SaaS founders, funders, and senior software engineers. The talk is all about adding GenAI and LLM features to software apps, but they were unclear exactly how or when the AI big wave revolution will ...

SaaS company growth rates are down, SaaS app buyers are frugal, IPOs are nonexistent, public SaaS multiples are low, big tech layoffs continue, and VC funding for SaaS has plummeted. Is this the end of the SaaS era? The B2B SaaS industry has ...

How will new AI technologies change traditional SaaS businesses and products in the next few years? Will they simply improve SaaS products and create higher value for customers while keeping the same per-user business model? Or will they ...

The DNA of a tech services business is almost the opposite of the DNA of a successful software product business. Here are the 3 biggest things tech services entrepreneurs need to understand to create a successful software product business. ...

A bootstrapped founder of a fast-growing £2 million ARR B2B SaaS company asked me what he should expect on their march to £10M in revenue. How will his role change? I told him that the founder/CEO role itself changes a lot in almost every ...

Beware of universal business recommendations on LinkedIn. Very few business rules always work for every business at all times. For everything else, it depends. The best advice for you today always depends on questions like these: What ...

Here are the biggest milestones for practical SaaS startups on the way to $5 million in ARR when they get started and grow without big VC funding:  Finding an idea that inspires you to start a company. Validating that customers have a ...

It was a great two days at the #SaaSOpen conference in Austin last week, where hundreds of serious SaaS founders learned from each other in one place.  Dozens of successful founders shared their hard-earned learnings from building ...

Almost all B2B SaaS companies are either horizontally or vertically focused. They either sell to all industries OR just one industry. There's another model in between that can be tricky to pull off but very powerful and ...

When a software company founder sells their company successfully, they have more choices about how they fund their next startup. I always ask these second-timers, “Will you raise venture funding again, or will you go the practical way ...

Building a great product is important to grow a SaaS startup into a valuable company. But it is figuroutable once you have deep knowledge of a big problem someone will pay you to solve. A customer you care about with a big problem AND a ...

I don't know what's going to happen in 2024 with SaaS funding, tech IPOs, M&A exits, or AI breakthroughs. But there are a few long-term trends I'm betting on that affect the SaaS industry. I'm not losing any sleep over what negative events ...

Is there anything big you expected to get done in your business this year that didn't quite happen? All of us had something that didn't go as well as we planned. I have heard these responses from capable SaaS founders and CEOs I know about the ...

Can experienced corporate leaders succeed in startups? Can startup leaders succeed in big companies? The answer to both is the same: It's possible, but it's not common. Most people who are successful in big companies struggle to retrain ...

When you grow a software business to $10 million ARR in three years without VC funding you keep your optionality as a founder and focus 100% of your energy on your customers. This is Customer Funding with sales and revenues. Not VC funding ...

Practical SaaS founders can win big without betting the farm, losing their health or family, or playing the all-or-nothing VC funding game. This is possible around the world, not just in the US or in the biggest cities. Bernardo Carvalho ...

Compared to 20 years ago, modern software companies are 10 times more resilient when the inevitable recessions, financial busts, wars, and other crises disrupt the economy. This is one of the reasons why SaaS companies are much more valuable ...

It is great to be around so many practical SaaS founders at the SaaStock conference in Dublin this week. There was more talk of bootstrapping this year than about big VC funding. This photo is what the Bootstrap Stage looked like for two ...

Creating a real SaaS business is more like climbing Everest than doing a hard workout at the gym. The startup climb is totally possible, but the odds are against you. It takes unusual effort to get through each of the stages and it takes a team ...

We often hear that 50% of new businesses don't make it through their first year. Or that 90% of startups fail. That's not the whole story or even useful for software entrepreneurs. Software and tech startups are not normal small businesses ...

l operations are often neglected by startup and early-stage founders, but it always comes back to bite them later. Here are 5 most common questions I hear from serious SaaS founders and CEOs about financial ops:  Which SaaS metrics are most ...

WeWork announced this week that they have "a substantial doubt of continuing as a going concern." This is a pre-bankruptcy announcement. They will likely wind it down and sell off the assets to pay creditors. WeWork could have been a great, ...

Many startup experiments don’t end up growing big and winning a big prize for founders. Failure is actually a possibility, however you define it. The lessons learned can be just as powerful as the success stories. Many VC-funded software ...

Here’s my biggest surprise after interviewing 46 successful practical founders on the podcast in the last year: When you aren’t raising big funding from outside investors… There are as many ways to grow a valuable software company as there are ...

In the last 5-10 years, we have seen a tech funding boom and bust, technology waves of web3 and AI, and other big shifts in the software world. But these deeper changes have changed the startup SaaS game the most: It's getting cheaper and ...

If you're a leader in a growing company, at any level, you need to spend some of your time working on the future, not just executing for today. That can feel impossible when the mountain of urgent execution tasks can take up every waking hour. ...

A software company CEO with a growing $2M ARR software company asked me what he should expect on their march to $10M in revenue. How will his role change? The founder-CEO role itself changes a lot in almost every company at this phase in these ...

A software company CEO with a growing $2M ARR software company asked me what he should expect on their march to $10M in revenue. He can feel that his business is changing fast internally. He knows what got them here won't get them there. He ...

If we don't raise outside funding for our bootstrapped SaaS company, should we offer equity shares to key employees? A practical founder with a growing SaaS company asked me that the other day. He worked for a couple of VC-backed companies ...

What do you do when one of the key leaders in your growing software business is struggling? Struggling to build productive teams, hit reasonable goals, and keep up as your business organization evolves through its growth phases. This topic ...

What did you think your software business was going to be when you started it? Is that actually what it is now? I ask this question of software company founders I talk to every week who have up-and-running SaaS businesses with $2M or $20M in ...

SaaS companies have had a relatively steady playing field for the last 10 years. No major disruptions have put off the steady growth and adoption of SaaS. But now generative AI and large language models are looking like the next disruptive ...

I’m traveling with my wife on holiday this week in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time. One of the highlights of the trip was meeting an amazing practical SaaS founder I know from Edinburgh—Craig Letton, founder of MRM Global. Last year, ...

When a venture investor doesn’t invest in a software company, they often describe the startup’s product as “just a feature.” A feature that could easily be built by a competitor. Or just a partial solution to the problem. But what if your ...

The biggest questions and concerns of SaaS CEOs change as their companies grow. Here are the most common issues I work on with founders I talk to every day by size and stage of the company: Growth Founders - getting to $1M ARR with ...

Everyone in tech will remember the day that SVB, "the bank for funded tech startups," surprisingly failed in just two days. Here's how I see it so far. What do you think? This can't be blamed on Jerome Powell's well-broadcast interest rate ...

Moving from a custom services business to the holy grail of a subscription-based software product business can take a while. Most don’t make it. Too much to invest for too long to get to a recurring software product business that can sustain ...

I met two new software entrepreneurs last week who set out to modernize the industry they succeeded in for the last 20 years. Their industry is a notorious technology late adopter. Almost none of the people who deeply understand their ...

Most funded startup companies are going through brutal "rationalizing and rightsizing" right now. This is a healthy exercise that bootstrappers go through every day. If you are breakeven and profitable in your business, you ask questions like ...

I got my annual "Your price for Quickbooks increased because we can" email from Intuit. They want me to pay almost 40% more than I paid two years ago. Intuit is a master of nickel and diming and raising prices. Because they can. ...

Here's the biggest difference I see between self-funded and overfunded software companies--from the inside. PACE. How fast you have to race ahead to meet your bigger goals. Founders with lots of outside funding have already made an explicit ...

There has never been a better time to start a B2B software company without big funding. Here are 10 reasons why: You can build the first sellable version of a B2B software app for $100K-$400K. Less if you are coding it (or no-coding it) ...

This week I talked to three practical founders of growing software businesses with $1M, $3M, and $7M annual revenues. Each of them told me, "I don't know what I don't know about the next stage of growth inside our company and for me as the ...

Bootstrapping, self-funding, and resisting big VC funding are still not very common in Silicon Valley these days. It's not as easy for startup founders to raise funding there this year, but serious outside funding has always been the main ...

I think the startup idea-to-business journey is mostly about this: Surviving long enough to keep experimenting, iterating, and trying things until you find a combination that can grow into a serious business. Startups are experiments to find a ...

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 ...

The Practical Founders Podcast is picking up steam every week after just 10 episodes so far. But I need your help. I want to interview more practical founders who are women. And people with different backgrounds. And practical founders outside ...

How are fast-growing SaaS companies scaling up the human-powered customer success and customer support that can't be automated? The tech talent crunch is real in every country around the world. In this month's Ask an Expert in-depth video ...

The role that good luck plays in startup success is usually overestimated by founders as they are building… and underestimated after they have achieved some success. I wrote that as a short post on LinkedIn here. Then my friend Hamid ...

Here are 20 of the most common types of software companies that I see right now. Which one describes your company? 1) The startup just starting. More hope than traction so far. 2) The big public company grinding it out every quarter. 3) The ...

Hamid Shojaee is one of the most well-known, successful, and generous entrepreneurs in the Arizona tech community. Hamid explains the most important lessons he learned building the two software companies he successfully sold in 2021, Axosoft ...

Q: What happens when a founder creates a vertical software company that grows slowly and steadily with just a little outside funding? A: The founder ends up being worth more than the VC-funded founders who told him he was doing it ...

Do you ever get 90% of the way through building a new business, product, or project only to realize you're only halfway done? This happens to me and every entrepreneur I know. I call it the "Other 90%" of the work. You already put in a ton ...

Many startup founders complain that investors won't invest until they show a lot more traction. Proof that the product works, that customers love it, and that the CEO can grow it. They aren't the only ones waiting for you to show more ...

We sometimes hear that 50% of new businesses don't make it through their first year. Or that 90% of startups fail. Maybe. Here's my take on it for software startups. First, software and tech startups are not normal small businesses like your ...

The highest-leverage way to grow a business faster is to DOUBLE DOWN on a target market, sales channel, use case, or marketing message that is already working very well. But there's another playbook that also gets companies (and careers) ...

Every mentor, advisor, consultant, board member, or peer founder has a powerful magic trick when they give feedback or advice to an entrepreneur. They are not you. They haven't been fanatically thinking about your business all day and all ...

Founders often tell me they want to create an advisory board. I ask this question to see if this would be useful for the founder: Do you just need more advice, do you also need accountability or just credibility? 95% of founders just need ...

There is more Service in most SaaS product businesses than they let on. The general baseline for B2B SaaS companies is that at least 80% of revenues are from software, less than 20% from paid services. That doesn’t count unpaid ...

These two things never go together: 1) Ambitious startup founder with growing revenues and big exit ambitions. "Someday this will be worth millions." 2) No lawyer or "some lawyer I know" who isn't focused on working with early-stage tech ...

I talked to a software startup founder in London yesterday who was in a bit of a mess. His MVP software was late, they are running out of money, not sure about customer demand, and have big co-founder disagreements. Sorry to say, it's the ...

How are entrepreneurs getting software built for their startups this year? Does the tech stack matter? Offshore, nearshore, or US-based teams? No code? In this Ask an Expert in-depth video interview, I ask software development expert Vincent ...

For big businesses, the main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing. For startups, the main thing is surviving long enough to find your main thing.

Ben Chestnut sold Mailchimp for $12 billion to Intuit. Big news, but there has been little media coverage and celebration. You'd think there would be gushing stories and endless positive headlines about growing a business without outside ...

Startups are everywhere. Everyone seems to be starting something. Where are all the finish-ups? Where are all the founders and their teams getting to their end game? For all the starts who raise money from investors, finishing up is ...

Two weeks ago I volunteered to judge a live startup pitch day with 23 undergraduate presenters at a major university in the Dallas area. Seven of the 23 startup pitches were already micro-businesses run by these students (or were very close ...

Gregslist Phoenix is 5 years old this week. Gregslist.com/Phoenix I published my first curated Gregslist of 126 Phoenix software companies in August 2016. Back then, tech leaders and SaaS founders in Phoenix didn't think there was much going ...

Last week in Phoenix I spent an hour with my good friend Hamid Shojaee to talk shop on his AZ Tech Podcast. Here's what we talked about: - What's happening in the Arizona startup tech scene right now - Which Phoenix software companies are ...

Several times a month I talk to successful founders of: recurring revenue businesses that have great margins that are powered by software. But they aren't SaaS software businesses. They are "Service as a Software" businesses. (Yes, I ...

Gregslist started in Phoenix with 126 local software companies on the list in August 2016. Now there are over 5,000 software and SaaS companies on Gregslist.com in 11 cities in 2021. We also list all 2,500 new open SaaS jobs at those ...

There are 301 industry-focused software companies in Arizona right now on Gregslist.com/Phoenix. That's half of all B2B software companies in the state. Surprised? For the first 20 years of my career in software, there were almost no vertical ...

There are more than 1700 software and SaaS companies in Texas in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. There were already a lot of software companies in Texas before 2020 when more tech companies moved here. 742 software companies on Gregslist ...

Of all the founders of software companies I have worked with at Scaling Point in the last two years, half of their companies serve vertical markets. They are focused on a single industry. Not just an industry-market now so they can get to ...

Last year I met with over 300 founders and CEOs, worked deeply inside 30 businesses all over the U.S., and spoke to thousands of people at conferences and events. Despite that, my own business wasn’t a cakewalk and many things didn’t work out ...

Experienced venture capital investors have been telling us for years how they “invest in big markets and founding teams.” Markets and People. First, there needs to be a new market category that can grow big enough to support a couple ...

"I have this problem. What should we do?" a busy CEO asked me. "Well, it depends." The answer depends on your situation and what you are trying to accomplish. It depends on what's working in the world these days for this type of problem ...

The product your customers evaluate, purchase, use and talk about is not just the product you deliver to them. The actual product is critically important, but it’s not the “whole product” in the eyes of your customer. There’s more to the story, ...

Creating a new venture and surviving the brutal startup phase often feels like a negotiation in which you need to say Yes to everyone just to survive. This is the fastest way to end up in startup purgatory – you get started but you get stuck on ...

Even though I am 46 years old and live 1500 miles away from my Dad, not a week goes by when I don’t hear his voice in my head telling one of his many stories about business, marketing or management. We still talk weekly, but I am most often ...

Angel investors regularly hear pitches from local entrepreneurs who need money for their growing startups. Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs don't succeed in their first meeting with potential investors. How can you be more successful ...

Where do CEOs of small service companies struggle most when trying to create a "scalable" service business that can grow to be a large company? They underestimate the amount of refinement and development of their service offerings, marketing ...

You've been working hard to build your new product or launch your service. You're excited because your first potential customers are still interested in buying from you, despite several delays. Now it's time to start chasing more customers by ...