Practical Founders Podcast

#139: Bootstrapped Founder is Getting Ready for the AI Wave at $20M ARR – Shalin Jain

Apr 10, 2025

Shalin Jain is the founder and CEO of HappyFox, a successful bootstrapped company that provides modern help desk management software for customer service, support, and IT management organizations. Shalin and his small team in India built many successful products from 2000-2010, then focused on HappyFox and moved to the US in 2011.

HappyFox is a mid-market product that sells across industries and departments with an efficient product-led growth (PLG) approach. The product has matured with successful add-on products for live chat, AI support, business intelligence, and workflows.

The company has over 2200 customers, 110 employees, and now $20 million in revenue. Shalin plans to keep growing and leverage modern AI technology to become a much bigger company based on the disciplined product culture they have created.

Quote from Shalin Jain, founder and CEO of HappyFox

“I think software and its pricing need to be deflationary, just like hardware, where memory prices, hardware prices, and server prices have all been deflationary. But we are now going through a phase where software is actually getting more and more expensive.

“With the advent of AI and automation, software will become cheaper and more usage-driven. So, the best survivors in that phase would be the efficiently run companies that have not bloated themselves by charging more today to have more employees and spend more on ads.

“I believe software needs to get cheaper because it’s getting cheaper to run software every day; it’s getting cheaper to outsource to AI and build stuff with the help of AI as well. So software cost should not go up; it should go down.”

Links

Podcast Sponsor – Full Scale

This podcast is sponsored by Full Scale, one of the fastest-growing software development companies in any region. Full Scale vets, employs, and supports over 300 professional developers, designers, and testers in the Philippines who can augment and extend your core dev team. Learn more at fullscale.io.

Cover Photo of Practical Founders Podcast

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.

Spotify Logo
Apple Podcasts Logo
YouTube Logo

Related Podcasts

No results found.