Practical Founders Podcast with Greg Head
Every week, host Greg Head interviews a successful software founder who started, grew, and sometimes sold a valuable software company—without big funding.
Over $8 billion of founder equity value has been created by just 130 SaaS founders interviewed on this podcast so far. That’s an average of $60 million founder of equity value created by each company.
Rachit Khator is the founder and CEO of Stackby, a no-code spreadsheet and database app builder that allows business users to create powerful spreadsheet-like applications with data links, automations, and workflows. Rachit and his team of ...
Guy Rubin is the co-founder and CEO of Ebsta, a revenue intelligence platform that works with Salesforce and Hubspot to automatically analyze existing data to improve sales performance. Started in London in 2012, Ebsta found success in the ...
Krista Morgan started her first tech company by raising funding and trying to grow very fast. When the company faced a big issue and failed, she learned that big funding was more of a problem than a help in the growth and wind-down ...
Ian Manners was a successful consultant for pharmaceutical companies in the US when he discovered a major problem that needed a software solution. Big pharma companies provide financial assistance funding for patients who require their drugs ...
Dave Lambert and his team at Right Side Capital Management are the most active venture capital investors, having invested in over 2,000 startups since 2012.
Right Side Capital is a "pre-VC" institutional investor that operates very ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...
Erin Fletter had a long career in the restaurant business before starting an after-school enrichment program to teach kids how to cook at her daughters' school in 2011. Her cooking program became popular, and she improved and expanded it to ...
In this second of two episodes, Practical Founders Podcast host Greg Head discusses the next five important things venture capital investors don't tell new SaaS startup founders. Greg emphasizes that VCs invest in very few businesses and seek ...
In episode 1, Practical Founders Podcast host Greg Head discusses the most important things that venture capital investors don't tell new SaaS startup founders. He emphasizes that VCs invest in very few businesses and are looking for big wins. ...
Mike Trasatti spent 10 years in the automotive dealer software business before he found an auto dealer in Iowa who had built is own complete software system. They partnered up in 2008, and Mike became the first CEO of the spinout software ...
Brian Abernethy, founder of Utopaya, is an expert in helping SaaS leaders navigate the complicated process of adding payments monetization to their product offerings and business strategies. With a long history in the payments industry, Brian ...
Jeff Corn is the co-founder and former CEO of Virtuance, one of the US's leading real estate photography and marketing providers. In 2010, Jeff was in the real estate investment business and wondered why it took $10,000 and nearly a month to ...
Adam Haynes is a managing director at GLC Advisors, an M&A advisory firm that helps bootstrapped founders sell their companies successfully. The GLC software advisor team has been working with practical software founders for over 15 years ...
Matt Wolach spent 15 years as a successful SaaS account rep, sales leader, and software founder before becoming a SaaS sales coach for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. He has worked with over 250 SaaS founders and sales leaders worldwide to ...
Charlie Alsmiller is the founder and CEO of APIWORX, a powerful integration platform for mid-sized ecommerce companies. Charlie is an experienced, practical founder who has created and grown several software companies. His first venture was ...
David Evans, the managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, a seed fund focused on AI-focused software startups. David discusses the role of AI in software development and the opportunities it presents for practical SaaS startups. He shares his ...
Phil Dur is cofounder and managing partner of PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity investment firm that works with bootstrapped SaaS founders who are scaling up to become sizable market leaders. Phil has been funding capital-efficient software ...
Joe McMenemon and his college roommate, Brendan, knew they wanted to start a business together. They had run their college fraternity chapter and saw the problem of managing members and collecting payments. So they lived frugally and built ...
Jeromy Wilson spent over ten years in the software business as a product management leader working for PE-owned and VC-funded software companies. When he decided to start his own software company, he focused on serving public libraries, like ...
Paul Van Metre was the co-founder of a successful machine shop that manufactured custom parts for the aerospace and medical device industries. Over 15 years, they created and improved software to run their entire business, which created huge ...
Chris Savage is the co-founder of Wistia, a leading video marketing platform for businesses. Wistia was started in 2007 by Chris and a college friend when inexpensive cloud hosting and easy web video encoding became available. They created the ...
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, a leading SEO software for marketers created in 2007 that grew out of the active followers of Rand's popular SEOmoz blog. Moz grew quickly to over $30 million in revenue by 2013, having raised ...
Nathan Hirsch, co-founder of FreeUp, shares his journey of building and selling the company and his other business adventures. FreeUp provides clients with pre-vetted virtual assistants (VAs) and freelancers in an online marketplace.
Nathan ...
Ian Brodie, the co-founder and CEO of Levanta, shares his journey of building a successful SaaS company in the affiliate marketing space.
Levanta is an affiliate marketing platform for Amazon sellers, enabling them to connect with content ...
Gregg Scoresby founded CampusLogic in Phoenix in 2021 to provide software for colleges and universities in the US to make it easier for students to apply for college loans and grants online. Initially self-funded, CampusLogic raised investment ...
Esben Friis-Jensen and his cofounder, Sebastian Seilund, teamed up in 2021 to create Userflow, a no-code user onboarding product for SaaS companies. This week, it was announced that Userflow has been acquired by Beamer, a maker of product user ...
Antony Ceravolo is a successful two-time startup founder from Adelaide, South Australia. He started his career in investment banking but left in 2002 to start a DVD rental business in London that raised funding from big VCs and Amazon. It grew ...
Raj Khera is an experienced practical SaaS founder who has used search engine optimization (SEO) to grow businesses very efficiently. Now he coaches entrepreneurs at MoreBusiness on how to use organic SEO as a core part of their marketing ...
Justin Hewett started in the software business as a territory sales manager for an education software company in Utah. The company grew and Justin eventually led the sales team as the senior executive. When the company was acquired by PE ...
Morgan Katz is the founder and CEO of Ticketnology. Morgan was an enthusiastic athlete with a degree in sports management who started her career in ticket sales for sports teams and front-line venue management. Morgan saw how companies with ...
#76: Real Estate Investor Built Her Own CRM Solution and Created a Market Leader – Stephanie Betters
Stephanie Betters was a practicing Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery and an active real estate investor when her frustration with disparate real estate CRM and marketing solutions hit a boiling point. Salesforce and a development partner ...
Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a ...
Kevin McArdle spent 15 years working in large software companies before becoming a practical investor and acquirer of very small SaaS businesses. Kevin is the CEO and co-founder of Big Band Software, a holding company that buys and holds small, ...
Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol, a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional ...
Hamed Mazrouei owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete turnkey connectivity and managed network ...
Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their ...
Jafar Owainati was a mechanical engineer before he got an MBA in entrepreneurship and decided to start a software company with two friends. They looked at many ideas before building software to help sales engineers respond to Requests for ...
Miles Schwartz a cofounder of Zūm Rails, a fast-growing fintech based in Canada with a growing worldwide presence. In just 3.5 years and without any outside funding, Zūm Rails has grown from a focused startup to a credible open banking and ...
Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising. He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he ...
When Patrick Randolph discovered that doctors' offices lose 20% of appointments due to patient cancellations and no-shows, he set out to design and test a solution. QueueDr was created to fill those open slots with patients in the waitlist ...
Raj Khera has had three exits in his long career as a software entrepreneur and leader. His first company, GovCon, grew in the late 1990s to help government contractors easily access new contracts up for bid by the US government. Their ...
Robin Alex worked in a digital marketing agency in Dallas when he discovered their small business clients struggled to nurture and follow up with their website leads. In 2018, Robin and two developers prototyped a marketing automation and CRM ...
Mike Roberts is the founder and CEO of SpyFu, a leading competitive research tool for marketers and entrepreneurs with over 15,000 paid customers and hundreds of thousands of free users. SpyFu was launched in 2006 and has been a profitable and ...
Raution Jaiswal grew up in India and then worked in management roles at large companies in the US before he discovered a problem experienced by small insurance agencies. He validated the problem, built an early solution, and didn't quit his ...
Kelly Mann was a CPA and auditor for 15 years before leaving her employer to start her own CPA firm focused on 401K benefits audits. She discovered a need to automate this process, validated the market with other CPAs, and created the first ...
Praveen Ghanta graduated from MIT with degrees in computer science and economics and worked for various financial services companies after trying his hand at a software startup. Working in his spare time, he built a product and recruited a ...
Oliver Low worked for Microsoft and then MySpace in London before creating a successful digital agency in 2010 with two friends. Their agency grew fast and was profitable, so they invested in building software apps to solve problems that they ...
In this expert interview, Vik Thapar of Cypress Growth Capital explains revenue-based financing (RBF) and how it can be very useful for practical SaaS founders. In the last 10 years, Vik and the Cypress team have funded over 50 SaaS and ...
Bryan Clayton is the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, a leading on-demand marketplace of lawn care services for homeowners across the US. With a team of 25 remote employees, they help 300,000 homeowners connect with 35,000 landscape service ...
Ben Murray is a former SaaS CFO and finance professional who helps SaaS founders understand the basics of SaaS accounting, finance, and metrics for their growing businesses. Ben has a popular blog and podcast with free educational resources to ...
Wissam Tabbara is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple software startups in Seattle since 2009 when he left Microsoft where he was a software development manager. He led multiple startup technology teams and now is an experienced CEO ...
Lloyed Lobo is the co-founder and former president of Boast.ai, a leading platform to help software companies in the US and Canada redeem available government tax credits. Technology-powered Boast.ai was launched in 2017 after starting a ...
Ryan Goodman joined the startup in the early days of the business intelligence and analytics market in 2003 as a specialist helping large customers adopt this new technology. This startup was acquired by the successful BI company Business ...
As the host of the Practical Founders Podcast, I have interviewed 46 successful SaaS founders and 6 savvy experts in the first year of weekly episodes. In this episode, I share some of the deeper insights, surprising lessons, and useful ...
Patrick Fingles grew a successful roofing company with hundreds in the Baltimore-Washington DC area. In 2013, they created software to help new salespeople estimate, quote, and close new roofing sales. They started selling the software to other ...
Jordan Fleming grew up in Toronto and New York, then lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for 15 years where he created a successful consultancy helping larger businesses automate and improve their processes. His experience developing workflow apps ...
Gregory Shepard is a serial entrepreneur who has created and sold 12 companies, including marketing software and ad technology companies. In 2016, he sold two of his bootstrapped software companies, AffiliateTraction and AdAssured to eBay for ...
Deepak Sindwani is a former software entrepreneur who has been a professional investor in software companies for over 20 years. Deepak is the co-founder and managing partner of Wavecrest Growth Partners, a growth equity investor in practical ...
Sam Knight is the co-founder and former president of BOLT Software, a project management and scheduling software for the construction trades that build residential homes. Sam helped lead the BOLT team as it grew before the company was sold and ...
Chris Kern is an expert independent M&A advisor who has helped over 150 growing tech companies get financing, obtain investment, or sell their companies. He is Managing Director of Windstream Partners where he advises smaller SaaS and tech ...
Joshua Strebel started a small SEO and website agency in the early 2000s after graduating from university. Joshua and his wife Sally experimented with website hosting using WordPress with low monthly fees while they ran their services business ...
Dave Savage was a top-producing mortgage loan officer in the early 1990s who used computers and software to help him sell more. He became a software entrepreneur by creating a new software solution for loan officers to help them educate their ...
Beth Sanders was selling computer software and equipment for a regional computer retailer in Ohio when she recorded her grandmother's life stories on a tape recorder. It was so powerful she decided to create a website in 2001 that allowed ...
Josh Haynam grew up in the Central Valley of California just 100 miles from the tech center of Silicon Valley without any awareness of tech jobs or tech businesses when he lived there. He was a successful high school entrepreneur who supported ...
Esben Friis-Jensen was a technology professional in Copenhagen, Denmark before he and three Danish friends moved to San Francisco in 2013 to start a new startup called Cobalt. Cobalt.io grew steadily and raised several rounds of VC funding to ...
Massimo Arrigoni grew up in Milan, Italy, and moved to California 27 years ago to create software products and start a family, eventually moving to the San Francisco area in Silicon Valley. While leading product at the software company MailUp, ...
"My B2B SaaS startup needs just more warm leads. But we have struggled when we hire junior salespeople to call on and email cold prospects to generate qualified leads that the CEO or salespeople can close."
This is a common frustration for ...
Dave Whorton is an experienced tech investor and funded founder who spent the first 20 years of his career at the highest levels of Silicon Valley venture capital and tech-boom startups. He started his career at Hewlett Packard and experienced ...
Windermere Real Estate is a large and well-known residential real estate broker in the Seattle area. In the late 1990s, they invested to build an internal software system to power their own business and differentiate their services. After using ...
Patrick Campbell wasn't expecting to be an entrepreneur when he grew up, but after his first few jobs, he struck out on his own in 2012 to create a software company to help SaaS businesses optimize their pricing. Price Intelligently quickly ...
Jon Nordmark founded eBags.com in 1998 as one of the first Internet e-commerce companies and grew it into the largest online retailer of luggage, bags, and travel accessories. Jon was previously a successful corporate executive who led ...
Perry Rosenbloom moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 2011 and started a small business offering digital marketing and custom website services. After building a website for his mother-in-law, an independent therapist, Perry created a scrappy ...
Gopal Krishnamurthy was an early BI and data analytics expert working for a large company when he left to start a BI consulting company called Visual BI in 2010. Visual BI grew to over 300 employees serving enterprise customers as an evangelist ...
Matt Watson was a two-time software company with two successful exits before he was 40 years old. He started his first company, VinSolutions, in his basement in Kansas City in 2006. VinSolutions started by helping auto dealers upload photos of ...
Deb Muller was an experienced HR executive at a large global company who left her job to start a consultancy specializing in managing important employee incident investigations. Surprisingly, her customers asked her for a software solution that ...
Vivek Bhaskaran was a computer science student in college who worked on an online survey project for a professor in the marketing department. After university, he built a new survey tool with a fellow software developer while they still held ...
Scott McCausland was an experienced software sales leader who decided to go out on his own in 2008 to build a new software business. His technical cofounder built the first version of their new software and Scott started selling it. MVP Systems ...
Oliver Palmer helped start a mobile app development agency in Sydney, Australia that built simple apps for early mobile phones. When the iPhone launched, Tigerspike grew very fast by creating branded mobile apps for large companies with its ...
Sandeep Kumar quit his job working for an Indian consulting company to start a software company in 2005, when product-focused startups were not common in India. For the next 10 years, they experimented with product features and customer ...
Sarah Hum studied graphic design in university before she discovered she loved to help software startups create new products. She moved to Silicon Valley to work at Facebook as a product designer, but a side project helped her find a problem ...
Mark Abbott was an active investor and board member for 20 years when he realized that most of the 100+ companies he helped were not good a their "business fundamentals." The fundamentals of setting long-term goals, making short-term plans, and ...
Craig Letton quit his corporate sales job in 2011 to take over his parents' small printing business in Scotland. It was his first time running a business and he learned hard business lessons quickly. Eventually, he discovered a huge need for ...
Jeff Matlow is a serial entrepreneur and a crazy triathlete and long-distance runner who found a way to put those passions together in a crazy software startup. He saw an opportunity to create a better registration experience for endurance ...
Howard Gottlieb created and sold several businesses before starting a school fundraising website in 2003 called Easy Fundraising Ideas. It grew into the most popular Internet website for school fundraisers. He experimented with many business ...
Scott Pickard didn't know he was embarking on a 15-year software entrepreneurial journey when he signed on to manage a horse veterinary practice in Calgary, Canada. But they had built some internal software to help them manage their large ...
Josh Cameron and three university friends started a scrappy software company in Brisbane Australia just after graduating. They had run the popular college bar where they discovered there was no simple software solution to track, onboard, and ...
Joe Griffin recently left his job of 8 years as co-CEO of ClearVoice, a company that he and co-founder Jay Swanson started in 2014 out of their digital marketing agency business in Phoenix, Arizona. ClearVoice was acquired by Fiverr in 2019 and ...
John Francis is a general partner at Stout Street Capital, a venture capital fund based in Denver, Colorado. Stout Street has made 70 small seed and pre-seed investments in software startups outside the big tech centers in North ...
Zach Moreno was a full-stack developer and coding instructor in Northern California in 2015 when he discovered audio podcasts. There wasn't a remote podcast software for recording high-quality audio over the Internet, so he decided to create ...
Karl Swannie was a geographer working in the scenic city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, when he started analyzing social media data based on location. He quickly saw there was valuable real-time information that was not being used, so he started Echosec Systems to find a practical use for those insights.
Brad Redding calls his first startup a “successful failure.” It didn’t end well, but he learned several very important lessons that helped him be more successful with his second startup, Elevar. Now the bootstrapped SaaS company is growing steadily with 45 remote employees. And Brad is learning fast to be a capable CEO of a larger SaaS software company.
Daniel Yuabov was a 22-year-old IT manager in New York who wanted to buy a new car. He was so frustrated with the buying experience that he started a software company called Carvoy to make it easy for car buyers to find, buy, and finance a ...
Melissa Kwan created her first software company in 2014 and then sold it in 2019. It was extremely difficult to start and even harder to grow, but it’s how she learned what not to do in her next startup and what was really “non-negotiable” in her life. Now she’s a nomadic world traveler and the founder of a growing software business.
Seth Radman created, grew, and sold two music app startups in his twenties. A saxophone player in his college marching band, Seth was passionate about helping musicians and school band directors to improve how they learn music using ...
Dougal Cameron created Golden Section to provide support and practical funding to SaaS founders with deep experience in select vertical markets. Their founder-first approach is different than the traditional VC or private equity investment ...
Sean Meister was a sales professional and leader with a successful career selling hospital and medical supplies before he left to join his long-time friend who had a vision for a new software company serving smaller trucking fleets with simple ...
Thomas Brown creatively bootstrapped his software company and ran it as a very small "lifestyle" business before committing to growing his SaaS business with a larger team.
Thomas was an independent insurance claims adjuster in the 1990s in ...
Nick Santora bootstrapped Curricula for five years with his co-founders before raising $3M in practical funding and then getting acquired in 2022 for $22 million.
Nick and his co-founders quit their jobs to build innovative story-based ...
Jeremy Clarke created, grew, and sold his software company in a most unusual and successful way:
He grew WebMerge to $5M revenue by just himself for 6 years before hiring his first and only employee, a strategic sales rep. It's an incredible ...
Luke Hohmann was an engineering and product management leader at Silicon Valley startups before he became an acclaimed author and speaker in the enterprise software development world. He used funding from his consulting business—plus revenue ...
Steve Gelley created two successful businesses and learned important lessons before he and a cofounder self-funded a third startup that was acquired in only 18 months for a big prize.
Steve started his entrepreneurial journey by buying, ...
Hamid Shojaee is a technical founder and serial entrepreneur who created several software companies and dozens of products in the last 25 years. He sold his two software companies in 2021—Axosoft and Pure Chat—and now is an active investor and ...
Dan Jaffe is the founder and CEO of LawLytics, a practical website marketing platform for small law firms. Dan was a practicing lawyer before he became an internet entrepreneur with his first venture, which he sold before he started LawLytics ...
Rafael Zimberoff was CEO of ShipRush, a software company he founded in 2001, then grew and eventually sold in 2017 to Descartes Systems Group for $17 million. Rafael started ShipRush as an add-on product for popular CRM and accounting software ...
Jonathan Cronstedt, also known as JCron, was the president of Kajabi software from 2016 through 2021 as he helped the company grow past the early startup years. JCron is a savvy entrepreneur, digital marketer, and sales leader who shares the ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...