Most SaaS founders dream about selling their companies and having the freedom to do whatever they want.
They surely get to do that after a successful exit, but few founders actually retire and stop working after a year or two out of the game.
More than 80% of the hundreds of successful SaaS founders I know who sold their companies get back in the game and start something else.
We loved this product-business-market-team creation game. There’s nothing like it, even when it’s brutally hard.
It’s rare that a successful founder actually “retires.” It’s not for me.
Brian Dosal was the founder and CEO of BrightGauge, a software company he bootstrapped and grew to almost $10M ARR with his brother before successfully selling the company in 2019.
BrightGauge is a business analytics and dashboard for key metrics for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry.
After his intense 9-year journey at BrightGauge, Brian “retired” to spend more time with his growing family.
He enjoyed his free time but eventually returned to the software startup game with his second company, Strety.
Strety is now a fast-growing SaaS business with a popular app for small businesses using the EOS® approach to manage their businesses.
It has 10 employees, hundreds of customers and partners, and no outside funding. Brian brought back some of his previous team to build another sustainable and valuable software company.
Brian describes his early retirement journey:
“It was surreal to sell my first company, BrightGauge. We announced that we sold the company in January, and I left the next day with no email and nothing to do. 37 years old.
“All right, now what? Then COVID hit a year later, and the world was ending. I was in a good spot, and that’s when I officially retired. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just knew I was too young to retire.
“My wife is a physician, and she went back to work the next day. We had a four-month-old kid, too. My brother thought I was a little crazy doing nothing, but I kind of enjoyed that time.
“But one of the dreams was to take our Strety product concept we started years ago and give it another go. So we started working on that with a new energy.”
Second-time founders can apply a lot of wisdom and experience to their new ventures, but it’s still hard and nothing is guaranteed.
It may not be easier the second time, but that doesn’t stop us.
Check out this practical interview with Brian Dosal on the Practical Founders Podcast.
