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 one. He and his childhood friend, Rock Felder, started working on their product and startup idea while they still had full-time jobs, with Zach as the CEO and CTO.
Now Squadcast.fm is one of the leading podcast recording studio platforms used by tens of thousands of audio podcasters all over the world, including me. Squadcast has since added high-quality video recording for YouTubers and other creators to easily generate professional-quality video content without using an expensive studio.
With 15 employees and over 10,000 customers, Squadcast is growing steadily and scaling up, but they are still a bootstrapped company with no outside investors. This is unusual in such a fast-growing market like podcasting tools and also because the co-founders live in the heart of big VC funding—Silicon Valley in Northern California.
Best quote from Zach:
“We bootstrapped as an experiment to see how far we could de-risk it and take things, to figure out how close we could get to product-market fit, and go through those first-time founder exercises. We’re customer-financed these days funded by our revenues.
“Bootstrapping was more like a series of experiments for us, both with our own level of personal investment and our sacrifice to build out this SaaS business asset for ourselves and our founding team. Control what we can when it comes to our costs, that’s just an added constraint.
“The independence that we’ve gained from being customer-financed is really interesting because we essentially have to focus just on them—our customers.”
In this episode, Zach explains:
- How they prototyped their idea and launched their MVP at a podcasting conference before it was really ready
- Why his timing was perfect to solve this problem with the explosion in podcasting and technical changes in browsers
- How he gets advice, support, and insights as a first-time CEO by reading books, meeting with VCs, and participating in a bootstrapped accelerator called TinySeed
- How he thinks about bootstrapping in Silicon Valley and why he hasn’t raised outside funding so far
- What he thinks the future looks like for audio and video content creators and how the market will change as it matures
Squadcast Company Facts
- Founded: 2016
- Description: Squadcast is a podcast and video recording platform for high-quality remote interviews
- Practical Funding Type: Bootstrapped with time when they had their day jobs, then customer funding (revenues) to fund growth. Minor investment from TinySeed for participating in their accelerator.
- Number of Employees: 13
- Location: Oakland, California
